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The pessimist in me reads this as "we are continuing investment in a promising line of business" couched as "we are doing good for the world". Am I too biased

The pessimist in me reads this as "we are continuing investment in a promising line of business" couched as "we are doing good for the world". Am I too biased against Google's intentions now? They say > We also pledged to provide $100 million to support third-party foundations, like OpenSSF, that manage open source security priorities and help fix vulnerabilities. So really this is just, we are spending another 10B on this line of business and we'll throw out a token 100 mil to the community.

vosper 5y ago
I think you're bang-on with "investment in a promising line of business" > First, organizations continue to depend on vulnerable legacy infrastructure and software, rather than adopting modern IT and security practices. Too many governments still rely on legacy vendor contracts that limit competition and choice, inflate costs, and create privacy and security risks. > Second, nation-state actors, cybercriminals and other malicious actors continue to target weaknesses in software supply chains and many vendors don’t have the tools or expertise to stop them. Pretty much it's "we're better at security than most other vendors, and we want to get in on those sweet government and corporate contracts". They're probably not wrong, I would bet Google is better at security than most companies are. One way of reading "legacy vendor contracts" is "legacy-vendor contracts" :) > We are also pledging, through the Google Career Certificate program, to train 100,000 Americans in fields like IT Support and Data Analytics, learning in-demand skills including data privacy and security. Let's take a guess at whose systems they'll be getting trained on :)
Barrin92 5y ago
>Am I too biased against Google's intentions now? Regardless of what their intentions actually are those two are not necessarily in conflict with each other.
bla3 5y ago
> token 100 mil 100 mil isn't peanuts, not even for Google.
- qzw 5y ago
  Didn’t they pay $150M to one guy who still stole their proprietary self-driving data and sold it to Uber? So maybe not peanuts, but not much more than almonds, either.
- tofuahdude 5y ago
  Its literally 1% of the balance they're discussing in the post. That's just a goodwill play.
- gpas 5y ago
  Google net income is around $60B yearly (steadily increasing), $5B a month, circa $170 millions every day. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOGL/financials https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOGL/financials
- rurp 5y ago
  It's only 1% of the total spend here, so I'd say it clearly is peanuts to Google. Spending 1% of a project's budget on a marketing initiative is not particularly exceptional.
bgilly 5y ago
The author of the blog post is a senior PR (titled government relations, but basically same thing) guy, so I think your assessment is fair. IMO - Every word of that blog post should be taken as code for "this should keep the US government off our back for a while and probably help us win contracts."
alienalp 5y ago
Simply they cant make any good with giving that much money to third parties. There arent enough third party to make good use of that much money and it is very hard to spend that money strategically.
nimbius 5y ago
the simplest interpretation of Occhams Razor is often the accurate assumption, pessimism or no. the fact that Google hasnt abandoned SMS 2FA alone should suffice as evidence enough they are pursuing this as a purely financial strategy.
meowface 5y ago
It's probably a mix of both. I think it'd probably either be too cynical or too naive to think it's entirely one or the other. (I realize my post is a wishy-washy nothing-statement that could mean anything, so to make it a little more concrete: I'd roughly guess like 70/30 self-interest/PR:altruism/"herd security".)

vosper 5y ago

I think you're bang-on with "investment in a promising line of business" > First, organizations continue to depend on vulnerable legacy infrastructure and software, rather than adopting modern IT and security practices. Too many governments still rely on legacy vendor contracts that limit competition and choice, inflate costs, and create privacy and security risks. > Second, nation-state actors, cybercriminals and other malicious actors continue to target weaknesses in software supply chains and many vendors don’t have the tools or expertise to stop them. Pretty much it's "we're better at security than most other vendors, and we want to get in on those sweet government and corporate contracts". They're probably not wrong, I would bet Google is better at security than most companies are. One way of reading "legacy vendor contracts" is "legacy-vendor contracts" :) > We are also pledging, through the Google Career Certificate program, to train 100,000 Americans in fields like IT Support and Data Analytics, learning in-demand skills including data privacy and security. Let's take a guess at whose systems they'll be getting trained on :)

Barrin92 5y ago

>Am I too biased against Google's intentions now? Regardless of what their intentions actually are those two are not necessarily in conflict with each other.

bla3 5y ago

> token 100 mil 100 mil isn't peanuts, not even for Google.

qzw 5y ago
Didn’t they pay $150M to one guy who still stole their proprietary self-driving data and sold it to Uber? So maybe not peanuts, but not much more than almonds, either.
tofuahdude 5y ago
Its literally 1% of the balance they're discussing in the post. That's just a goodwill play.
gpas 5y ago
Google net income is around $60B yearly (steadily increasing), $5B a month, circa $170 millions every day. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOGL/financials https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOGL/financials
rurp 5y ago
It's only 1% of the total spend here, so I'd say it clearly is peanuts to Google. Spending 1% of a project's budget on a marketing initiative is not particularly exceptional.

bgilly 5y ago

The author of the blog post is a senior PR (titled government relations, but basically same thing) guy, so I think your assessment is fair. IMO - Every word of that blog post should be taken as code for "this should keep the US government off our back for a while and probably help us win contracts."

alienalp 5y ago

Simply they cant make any good with giving that much money to third parties. There arent enough third party to make good use of that much money and it is very hard to spend that money strategically.

nimbius 5y ago

the simplest interpretation of Occhams Razor is often the accurate assumption, pessimism or no. the fact that Google hasnt abandoned SMS 2FA alone should suffice as evidence enough they are pursuing this as a purely financial strategy.

meowface 5y ago

It's probably a mix of both. I think it'd probably either be too cynical or too naive to think it's entirely one or the other. (I realize my post is a wishy-washy nothing-statement that could mean anything, so to make it a little more concrete: I'd roughly guess like 70/30 self-interest/PR:altruism/"herd security".)