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I don't understand Google's App store play. Just another walled garden where things like this can happen. They were the champions of the open web for a long ti

by fjabre 6y ago

I don't understand Google's App store play. Just another walled garden where things like this can happen. They were the champions of the open web for a long time. What happened?

cgb223 6y ago
They found out if you close it and own it, you can make more money
jacquesm 6y ago
Schmidt, greed.
_jal 6y ago
> They were the champions of the open web for a long time. Because that's what you say when you're the underdog. Remember Apple's 1984 ad? Microsoft's "a computer on every desk"? The tech industry seems to support a rotating cast of monopolists riding atop whatever gate-keeping function emerges, each one holding on as long as it can until replaced by something that ends up looking a lot like the last top dog.
- comboy 6y ago
  I'm quite confident you can't run a company as big as Google without being evil but it seems useful to ponder why does it happen. Corpo structure seems to have something to do with it, separate things into categories, then teams get categories and optimize locally without taking bigger picture into account (or even knowing what the picture is). Some regulations, maybe some pressures from some agencies about which they are not allowed to talk about. Etc. But at some point I have to wonder about the mind of someone decisive in the company when "are we the baddies" question appears. Do they rationalize and think that "well, we need to do this because security botnets blahblah users have no idea what we are dealing with here and it's for their own good even if they don't understand it yada yada", or do they just don't give a shit. Or maybe it's like with me disliking my government - I definitely don't like it but I don't feel like fighting that giant machine at the moment, I can't do anything on my own, it would require cooperation and a plan and I have some stuff to do.
  - rtkwe 6y ago
    There's a lot of reasons. Building a closed guarden that locks people in feels a lot safer from a competition standpoint than the alternative, if you can make it hard to steal your customers and only a few (always remember that being on and reading HN means you're not much of an average user), it's also just easier than being open, a closed system can make changes much faster than an open one that has to get concensus before adding a new feature for example. In this specific case and most of the time where Google's complete lack of support shows up it's because having manual review costs money and the process that screws the app developer is easier than having a secondary process that needs more people to decide if the first automated or rote manual scan made a mistake.
  - Blikkentrekker 6y ago
    It's quite simple: if one not be evil, one won't become or remain as big. It's simple survival of the fittest. The lion who feels compassion for his prey will not pass his genes to the next generation.
  - deckard1 6y ago
    > seems useful to ponder why does it happen. Ooooh. I know this one! Because that's what VCs want. AirBNB, Uber, Postmates, Google, Facebook, Apple. VCs want to invest in winner-takes-all platforms and markets with incredibly strong network effects. But don't say any of that out loud: https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/08/07/google-documents-show-taboo-words-antitrust https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/08/07/google-doc... All these people rushing in to Silicon Valley with hat-in-hand going from VC to VC talking about how they care so much about the user or the product. It's all a giant colossal fucking sham. You're there to become a billionaire. Can we all stop dancing around this fact already? Paul Graham and his fucking essays. The pretentious VC Twitterverse. It's always been about the money. Facebook's earliest slide deck tells the story of how they are going to harvest their users' private data and offer it up to advertisers: https://app.slidebean.com/p/s15UZQkE7T/Facebooks-original-pitch-deck https://app.slidebean.com/p/s15UZQkE7T/Facebooks-original-pi... This is back when they were still "The Facebook" and a tiny startup. They didn't suddenly become evil and greedy. Greed and evil was the plan. It's right there. Google is no different.
- toyg 6y ago
  You could replace “the tech industry” with “capitalists” and it would only gain in correctness. There is no market incentive to be “good” past a certain size, and plenty of incentives to be “evil”.
floatingatoll 6y ago
They automated everything in order to not have to invest in human labor, in order to profit most greatly from scale while paying the fewest people they can get away with. Their original index was just an algorithm that distilled human labor from webrings and indexes, that supposedly was great on its own (hint: nope, they crawled the entire Internet, and yet they still remain critically dependent on blogs and news sites for the volunteer labor their algorithm depends on).
rodgerd 6y ago
> They were the champions of the open web for a long time. What happened? It was a con.
pjmlp 6y ago
ChromeOSissfication of the Web happened, with lots of FOSS developers putting Chrome everywhere, including bundling it as "native" application.
Blikkentrekker 6y ago
Joseph Stalin was a champion of the poor, before he became very rich.
rmsaksida 6y ago
> What happened? People fell for it.
brookmg 6y ago
They removed the "don't be evil" motto.

by fjabre 6y ago

I don't understand Google's App store play. Just another walled garden where things like this can happen. They were the champions of the open web for a long time. What happened?

cgb223 6y ago

They found out if you close it and own it, you can make more money

jacquesm 6y ago

Schmidt, greed.

_jal 6y ago

> They were the champions of the open web for a long time. Because that's what you say when you're the underdog. Remember Apple's 1984 ad? Microsoft's "a computer on every desk"? The tech industry seems to support a rotating cast of monopolists riding atop whatever gate-keeping function emerges, each one holding on as long as it can until replaced by something that ends up looking a lot like the last top dog.

comboy 6y ago
I'm quite confident you can't run a company as big as Google without being evil but it seems useful to ponder why does it happen. Corpo structure seems to have something to do with it, separate things into categories, then teams get categories and optimize locally without taking bigger picture into account (or even knowing what the picture is). Some regulations, maybe some pressures from some agencies about which they are not allowed to talk about. Etc. But at some point I have to wonder about the mind of someone decisive in the company when "are we the baddies" question appears. Do they rationalize and think that "well, we need to do this because security botnets blahblah users have no idea what we are dealing with here and it's for their own good even if they don't understand it yada yada", or do they just don't give a shit. Or maybe it's like with me disliking my government - I definitely don't like it but I don't feel like fighting that giant machine at the moment, I can't do anything on my own, it would require cooperation and a plan and I have some stuff to do.
- rtkwe 6y ago
  There's a lot of reasons. Building a closed guarden that locks people in feels a lot safer from a competition standpoint than the alternative, if you can make it hard to steal your customers and only a few (always remember that being on and reading HN means you're not much of an average user), it's also just easier than being open, a closed system can make changes much faster than an open one that has to get concensus before adding a new feature for example. In this specific case and most of the time where Google's complete lack of support shows up it's because having manual review costs money and the process that screws the app developer is easier than having a secondary process that needs more people to decide if the first automated or rote manual scan made a mistake.
- Blikkentrekker 6y ago
  It's quite simple: if one not be evil, one won't become or remain as big. It's simple survival of the fittest. The lion who feels compassion for his prey will not pass his genes to the next generation.
- deckard1 6y ago
  > seems useful to ponder why does it happen. Ooooh. I know this one! Because that's what VCs want. AirBNB, Uber, Postmates, Google, Facebook, Apple. VCs want to invest in winner-takes-all platforms and markets with incredibly strong network effects. But don't say any of that out loud: https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/08/07/google-documents-show-taboo-words-antitrust https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/08/07/google-doc... All these people rushing in to Silicon Valley with hat-in-hand going from VC to VC talking about how they care so much about the user or the product. It's all a giant colossal fucking sham. You're there to become a billionaire. Can we all stop dancing around this fact already? Paul Graham and his fucking essays. The pretentious VC Twitterverse. It's always been about the money. Facebook's earliest slide deck tells the story of how they are going to harvest their users' private data and offer it up to advertisers: https://app.slidebean.com/p/s15UZQkE7T/Facebooks-original-pitch-deck https://app.slidebean.com/p/s15UZQkE7T/Facebooks-original-pi... This is back when they were still "The Facebook" and a tiny startup. They didn't suddenly become evil and greedy. Greed and evil was the plan. It's right there. Google is no different.
toyg 6y ago
You could replace “the tech industry” with “capitalists” and it would only gain in correctness. There is no market incentive to be “good” past a certain size, and plenty of incentives to be “evil”.

floatingatoll 6y ago

They automated everything in order to not have to invest in human labor, in order to profit most greatly from scale while paying the fewest people they can get away with. Their original index was just an algorithm that distilled human labor from webrings and indexes, that supposedly was great on its own (hint: nope, they crawled the entire Internet, and yet they still remain critically dependent on blogs and news sites for the volunteer labor their algorithm depends on).

rodgerd 6y ago

> They were the champions of the open web for a long time. What happened? It was a con.

pjmlp 6y ago

ChromeOSissfication of the Web happened, with lots of FOSS developers putting Chrome everywhere, including bundling it as "native" application.

Blikkentrekker 6y ago

Joseph Stalin was a champion of the poor, before he became very rich.

rmsaksida 6y ago

> What happened? People fell for it.

brookmg 6y ago

They removed the "don't be evil" motto.