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It's just an anecdote, but last week was the point at which I switched away from the Android YouTube client for casual video watching. I don't have an issue at

It's just an anecdote, but last week was the point at which I switched away from the Android YouTube client for casual video watching. I don't have an issue at all with them showing ads, but it has really gotten to another level recently. The frequency, duration, and the trend towards unskippable ads has been extremely sharp, at least for me. Their implementation is also fairly bad; in spots where my wifi is not great, I frequently have the video reset to an unwatchably low quality after an ad, and buffer for 10+ seconds, even though pre-ad, everything was working just fine. Their paid offering is probably OK, but slightly overpriced IMHO (e.g. when compared with NetFlix), especially for a family - and I would be more inclined to go with it, if it wasn't for their heavy-handed advertising of that, too. With the lack of competitors, I suspect most people will stay; but there's definitely something to this.

prepend 6y ago
I have simile personal anecdotes and do feel like the author is close to some truth. But I think it may just be my wishful thinking to confirm to what I believe. Companies can coast on way past their prime and maybe Google ends up being CBS or something in 100 years (they were a big technology innovator in the early to mid 20th century). And IBM still has lots of customers even though they aren’t what they once were. I remember using Novell [0] in the mid 90s and they stayed around until 2014 making money with 1000s of employees somehow. So I guess there’s companies that stop being interested to me from a technology perspective and that’s a form “collapse” even though they’re still making gobs of cash and existing. Maybe the author really means we’ve hit “Peak Google” and it’s all downhill from here. But I think it’s important that the peak of the Roman Empire was like 117AD but it took hundreds of years to really stop (maybe the peak was really 10AD under Augustus and maybe it still exists today, but you get my drift).
- danielbarla 6y ago
  I agree; it's fairly unlikely that this is a huge downward turning point for them. I suspect they are keeping an eye on market trends, and basically know they are close to untouchable (although it's probably dangerous to play with that quite this severely). That said, I think one core difference to the parallels you drew is that Google is perhaps less diversified (in terms of revenue source) than those companies were, prior to their "pivots".

prepend 6y ago

I have simile personal anecdotes and do feel like the author is close to some truth. But I think it may just be my wishful thinking to confirm to what I believe. Companies can coast on way past their prime and maybe Google ends up being CBS or something in 100 years (they were a big technology innovator in the early to mid 20th century). And IBM still has lots of customers even though they aren’t what they once were. I remember using Novell [0] in the mid 90s and they stayed around until 2014 making money with 1000s of employees somehow. So I guess there’s companies that stop being interested to me from a technology perspective and that’s a form “collapse” even though they’re still making gobs of cash and existing. Maybe the author really means we’ve hit “Peak Google” and it’s all downhill from here. But I think it’s important that the peak of the Roman Empire was like 117AD but it took hundreds of years to really stop (maybe the peak was really 10AD under Augustus and maybe it still exists today, but you get my drift).

danielbarla 6y ago
I agree; it's fairly unlikely that this is a huge downward turning point for them. I suspect they are keeping an eye on market trends, and basically know they are close to untouchable (although it's probably dangerous to play with that quite this severely). That said, I think one core difference to the parallels you drew is that Google is perhaps less diversified (in terms of revenue source) than those companies were, prior to their "pivots".