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This reads like bitter grapes. One of Google's new products (Google Cloud) does more than 100x in revenue more than Basecamp and it's likely growing much faste

This reads like bitter grapes. One of Google's new products (Google Cloud) does more than 100x in revenue more than Basecamp and it's likely growing much faster too. Android is on billions of handsets. Chrome is the most popular browser. These are all new, non-search products.

Accacin 6y ago
And there's a great reason that they haven't got rid of Android and Chrome I guess. Maybe it's all that data they can harvest to better their advertising business.
thethimble 6y ago
Oh and then there’s YouTube, Maps, Docs/Drive, GSuite/Workspace, Classroom, Chromecast, etc. And also Tensorflow, Flutter. It’s definitely sad to see some products shut down. But it seems that that’s a natural consequence of experimentation. And I’m grateful for so many of the experiments that ended up sticking around.
- mshron 6y ago
  Agreed that Docs, Drive, GSuite are all a real enterprise businesses YouTube though is video ads, and Maps is local ads. I think that reinforces the author's point. (Open source projects like Tensorflow, Flutter, K8s are nice spin-offs but they're not going to command the same amount of attention or resources as revenue-generating products.)
  - hpcjoe 6y ago
    I'd add to that, from a recollection when my old company signed up for Gsuite many moons ago, you give them the right to use your emails, documents, etc. to help them train their models. Which is all about improving their actual product. Maps knows where you are and where you (regularly) travel. I get email updates from Google on this. Drive enables you to work on documents and files, and provides this implicit access to google to provide them training data (unless they changed that clause of the user agreement). While Gsuite is an "enterprise" product, that you pay for (and I did, for years), getting "support" out of google was damn near impossible. This seems to be a common theme with them. They stand something up, put up FAQ pages which don't cover what you run into, don't have a human you can contact, or a site you can email, or a ticket system you can report a problem into ... and leave you to figure out workarounds on your own. And, should your data masters decide that you are a bad company in any way, shape, or form, you can be completely removed from (all) their platform(s), with absolutely no recourse. Put another way, it is a huuuuuge risk to use them for anything in the critical business services path. FWIW, Microsoft seems to know how to sell/support services. Doesn't matter if their stuff is inferior in many regards, you can reach them if you have a problem. Though, quite likely, they can pull the plug on you quickly as well. But they are far more business friendly than google.
mindslight 6y ago
You have a valid point about Google Cloud, but Android and Chrome are both surveillance feeders for their core business of data mining, supporting the author's thesis. The problem isn't creating new technical products, but having the institutional desire to maintain them.
- rutierut 6y ago
  Yes and they were considering shutting down GCP, can't make this shit up
curryst 6y ago
To be fair, Android and Chrome basically only make sense in the context of propping up their search monopoly. I'm not aware of any substantial income from either, directly. My understanding is that the underpinnings of Google Cloud were built to support their own technology needs supporting their ad empire. It's also worth noting that Google Cloud indirectly supports their ad-based ventures. It gives them access to a higher economy of scale which makes serving ads cheaper, and customers are subsidizing development costs for things Google uses as well. They're complaining that Google is built on data-mining and selling that to advertisers, not specifically about search. Anything that fails to compete with the crazy profit margins of targeted advertising gets killed, which is pretty much everything at the moment. Google Cloud is somewhat of an outlier, I don't know why it's still around. They're still losing money on it, aren't they? I have a hard time believing the tangential benefits to their other products are enough to offset that, but I could be wrong.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Android and Chrome basically only make sense in the context of propping up their search monopoly Android and Chrome make sense in terms of defending all of their web-based offerings from a hostile mobile OS or browser monopoly. Their advertising dominance obviously is the only reason they had the money to throw at those problems, but a “search monopoly” isn't the only reason it made sense.
  - acdha 6y ago
    Agreed – I’d say “ad business” instead of “search monopoly”: Chrome is easily justified simply by making sure that most users spend most of their time on web sites rather than native apps. Web users are heavily accustomed to everything being subsidized by ads, and Google is definitely winning there even if you rarely use search.
- skybrian 6y ago
  It’s not the case that Google Cloud products are the same as the tools used internally. For example, Borg was never publicly released. Kubernetes is an open source project intended for public use.
hpcjoe 6y ago
2 of these 3 are data collection products providing some level of features to end users. That is, they are an implicit contract to provide google with an unending stream of up-to-date user data, in exchange for "free" features. GCP is a way to monetize excess capacity. The excess capacity in their data extraction machine. Search is not their product. Advertising is.
cosmarginean 6y ago
You clearly know very little about Basecamp and their values. They're very articulate that they're not competing with Google in any shape or form :)
- zepto 6y ago
  > They're very articulate that they're not competing with Google in any shape or form :) They can say that all they want, but it doesn’t make it true. In many ways it’s a pretty odd denial. It seems pretty likely that in the absence of Gmail, Hey would have a bigger market.
  - cosmarginean 6y ago
    > It seems pretty likely that in the absence of Gmail, Hey would have a bigger market. Many people just wouldn't pay for email so it's very hard to say. And again, they talk specifically about not competing with Google because they realise the disproportionate scale here: https://world.hey.com/jason/an-alternative-to-competition-ff57f4bc https://world.hey.com/jason/an-alternative-to-competition-ff... > They can say that all they want, but it doesn’t make it true. I've been following them for years and read most of their books. If this would be IBM or Oracle I'd understand (and agree with) your skepticism, but this is really unwarranted.

Accacin 6y ago

And there's a great reason that they haven't got rid of Android and Chrome I guess. Maybe it's all that data they can harvest to better their advertising business.

thethimble 6y ago

Oh and then there’s YouTube, Maps, Docs/Drive, GSuite/Workspace, Classroom, Chromecast, etc. And also Tensorflow, Flutter. It’s definitely sad to see some products shut down. But it seems that that’s a natural consequence of experimentation. And I’m grateful for so many of the experiments that ended up sticking around.

mshron 6y ago
Agreed that Docs, Drive, GSuite are all a real enterprise businesses YouTube though is video ads, and Maps is local ads. I think that reinforces the author's point. (Open source projects like Tensorflow, Flutter, K8s are nice spin-offs but they're not going to command the same amount of attention or resources as revenue-generating products.)
- hpcjoe 6y ago
  I'd add to that, from a recollection when my old company signed up for Gsuite many moons ago, you give them the right to use your emails, documents, etc. to help them train their models. Which is all about improving their actual product. Maps knows where you are and where you (regularly) travel. I get email updates from Google on this. Drive enables you to work on documents and files, and provides this implicit access to google to provide them training data (unless they changed that clause of the user agreement). While Gsuite is an "enterprise" product, that you pay for (and I did, for years), getting "support" out of google was damn near impossible. This seems to be a common theme with them. They stand something up, put up FAQ pages which don't cover what you run into, don't have a human you can contact, or a site you can email, or a ticket system you can report a problem into ... and leave you to figure out workarounds on your own. And, should your data masters decide that you are a bad company in any way, shape, or form, you can be completely removed from (all) their platform(s), with absolutely no recourse. Put another way, it is a huuuuuge risk to use them for anything in the critical business services path. FWIW, Microsoft seems to know how to sell/support services. Doesn't matter if their stuff is inferior in many regards, you can reach them if you have a problem. Though, quite likely, they can pull the plug on you quickly as well. But they are far more business friendly than google.

mindslight 6y ago

You have a valid point about Google Cloud, but Android and Chrome are both surveillance feeders for their core business of data mining, supporting the author's thesis. The problem isn't creating new technical products, but having the institutional desire to maintain them.

rutierut 6y ago
Yes and they were considering shutting down GCP, can't make this shit up

curryst 6y ago

To be fair, Android and Chrome basically only make sense in the context of propping up their search monopoly. I'm not aware of any substantial income from either, directly. My understanding is that the underpinnings of Google Cloud were built to support their own technology needs supporting their ad empire. It's also worth noting that Google Cloud indirectly supports their ad-based ventures. It gives them access to a higher economy of scale which makes serving ads cheaper, and customers are subsidizing development costs for things Google uses as well. They're complaining that Google is built on data-mining and selling that to advertisers, not specifically about search. Anything that fails to compete with the crazy profit margins of targeted advertising gets killed, which is pretty much everything at the moment. Google Cloud is somewhat of an outlier, I don't know why it's still around. They're still losing money on it, aren't they? I have a hard time believing the tangential benefits to their other products are enough to offset that, but I could be wrong.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dragonwriter 6y ago
> Android and Chrome basically only make sense in the context of propping up their search monopoly Android and Chrome make sense in terms of defending all of their web-based offerings from a hostile mobile OS or browser monopoly. Their advertising dominance obviously is the only reason they had the money to throw at those problems, but a “search monopoly” isn't the only reason it made sense.
- acdha 6y ago
  Agreed – I’d say “ad business” instead of “search monopoly”: Chrome is easily justified simply by making sure that most users spend most of their time on web sites rather than native apps. Web users are heavily accustomed to everything being subsidized by ads, and Google is definitely winning there even if you rarely use search.
skybrian 6y ago
It’s not the case that Google Cloud products are the same as the tools used internally. For example, Borg was never publicly released. Kubernetes is an open source project intended for public use.

hpcjoe 6y ago

2 of these 3 are data collection products providing some level of features to end users. That is, they are an implicit contract to provide google with an unending stream of up-to-date user data, in exchange for "free" features. GCP is a way to monetize excess capacity. The excess capacity in their data extraction machine. Search is not their product. Advertising is.

cosmarginean 6y ago

You clearly know very little about Basecamp and their values. They're very articulate that they're not competing with Google in any shape or form :)

zepto 6y ago
> They're very articulate that they're not competing with Google in any shape or form :) They can say that all they want, but it doesn’t make it true. In many ways it’s a pretty odd denial. It seems pretty likely that in the absence of Gmail, Hey would have a bigger market.
- cosmarginean 6y ago
  > It seems pretty likely that in the absence of Gmail, Hey would have a bigger market. Many people just wouldn't pay for email so it's very hard to say. And again, they talk specifically about not competing with Google because they realise the disproportionate scale here: https://world.hey.com/jason/an-alternative-to-competition-ff57f4bc https://world.hey.com/jason/an-alternative-to-competition-ff... > They can say that all they want, but it doesn’t make it true. I've been following them for years and read most of their books. If this would be IBM or Oracle I'd understand (and agree with) your skepticism, but this is really unwarranted.