5 ms·

Unlike Microsoft, where at least some of the business units could do pretty well on their own, if the company was broken up, I doubt the same would be true for

Unlike Microsoft, where at least some of the business units could do pretty well on their own, if the company was broken up, I doubt the same would be true for Google. Other than search and ads, I doubt other part would do particular well. Breaking up Google would result in a lot of people losing their job. I’m not arguing that you’re wrong in the idea of breaking up Google, but I doubt it will happen.

awild 5y ago
Wouldn't this be eventually a good thing? I imagine less free online services, which would condition people to also pay online more often. It would be a bumpy road, but I can see how online magazines could make more money that way, since I'm already used to paying for my online office suite, mail etc. It could also just lead to weird tie-in with a central ad service sharing anonymized data between all participating companies, basically spreading the data Google monopolizes further.
flyinglizard 5y ago
I can see at least five entirely separate units with very little synergy: 1. Search + Maps 2. GSuite + Gmail 3. GCP 4. YouTube 5. Android + Chrome Each can probably support its own P&L sheet, other than perhaps the last (not sure about that one). Such a move would surely limit innovation (I can’t see these smaller entities doing things like mobile ASIC development, although if TPU is under Search it would continue), but increase competition, especially in the ad market.
- capableweb 5y ago
  > Such a move would surely limit innovation [...] but increase competition Wouldn't increasing competition also increase innovation as more companies can actually enter the market with new ideas? Sure, the innovation at Google itself might go down, but that should hardly be an argument against solving their anti-competitive behavior.
  - flyinglizard 5y ago
    There are some things requiring capital investment at a scale that wouldn’t be feasible for a company outside the 100bn market cap club. Data centers, intercontinental data links, high end VLSI development, high end smartphone hardware and things like Waymo all come to mind. It’s more than cash alone, it’s low cost nature of their mistakes (because everything is paid for by Search anyway) that enables that.
    - kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
      With more companies competing, there will be more innovation overall.
- xmprt 5y ago
  I think Chrome being the largest browser provider could make big profits from partnering with other search providers to make one the default search engine.
- mrweasel 5y ago
  The only two of those I’m pretty sure could survive on their own is search and YouTube. Android and Chrome pretty much doesn’t have a business case. GCP might be big enough at this point, but is still just burning ad money. GSuite/GMail is again a maybe, but can it afford the infratructure? They would at least have to cribble the free tier.
  - darkwater 5y ago
    > Android and Chrome pretty much doesn’t have a business case. The 30% fee on everything Play Store seems a good enough business case to me.
    - emn13 5y ago
      But it's also fragile; that fee might not turn out to be sustainable.
      - darkwater 5y ago
        How come? Also they already have a dominant position, producer licensing can go a long way. Nobody is gonna make Android suddenly irrelevant in the next 10 years.
        emn13 5y ago
        As the epic vs. apple showdown shows, the position of gatekeeper is potentially legally tricky. Additionally, google works as a gatekeeper now because handset makers kind of need googles blessing. But android is open source, and potentially forkable. What really keeps handset makers onboard are the google services. But... if you split google, are those handset makers really going to feel as beholden to the android play store if they can get all major apps to run on an alternate store (already the case), and can get access to essentially all google apps without giving the android store any cut (after all, those aren't part of a single "google" bundle anymore then!) I suspect the 30% cut would have to go; that super-high margin is really a bit of rent-seeking behavior even today, and only sustainable due to Google's overall market position. It's so high that the case could be made that e.g. Samsung's efforts to duplicate it is merited solely as a form of negotiating leverage, rather than as an actual alternative today. Without the whole consumer lock-in and bundle deal that google provides today, androids value proposition is much, much weaker; they could simply offer additional stores with better pricing, and wait for android to come begging for scraps. Android the platform is certainly here to stay for a while, but as a business unit, assuming it were split from the rest of google? I'm less certain. I mean, I wouldn't count them out, but there are definitely competitors around that would gladly eat their lunch, and might actually succeed then too.
- 7952 5y ago
  That broadly equates to... 1. Ads 2. Corporate 3. Cloud infrastructure 4. Ads 5. Retail app sales and hardware. Maybe things get messy when those different models are mixed.
- emn13 5y ago
  Though this isn't is a bad idea, if we really want to avoid the inefficiencies stemming from monopolies, we need to not just break up by business unit, but even more so ensure those business units are not themselves little monopolies. That would likely mean breaking up the units too; i.e. not just 1 search provider, but at least two; not just 1 android but at least two, etc. Having each smaller niche served by its own monopoly is perhaps better than having just 1 monopoly with a larger niche, but it'll still just converge towards today's ever more feudal society. There is 0 polical interest in dealing with that though, and it would be a really tricky issue - after all, if you're serious about wanting to support capitalism, google is by no means the only company that needs to go. It would mean a fairly dramatic restructuring of the corporate landscape, and you'd need to have answers for scenarios where economies of scale are so lucrative, they outweigh the benefits of competition (would those be non-profits with multiple competing clients?) Also, the laws around intangible value (i.e. intellectual property) are pretty much designed for monopolization. Finally, we don't live in a vacuum; how will you deal with transnational corporations, and specifically with overseas monopolies that can play off the now smaller intra-national non-monopolists against each other? As tax-avoidance schemes have shown, corporate structures can get quite complex, so it's quite possible some kind of mutually dependent franchise system might develop with the true ownership still centralized and monopolistic - but external. All in all, the path towards the idealized capitalist system seems implausibly long. We're going to want ways of mitigating the damage before we get there, and that implies ways of dealing with these kind of non-capitalist entities in non-capitalist ways; perhaps a special huge-size tax and a more interventionist state. And even that seems like wishful thinking in today's political climate...
- tradertef 5y ago
  How about admob/adsense? The whole point of the article was about those units..
capableweb 5y ago
> Other than search and ads, I doubt other part would do particular well. Breaking up Google would result in a lot of people losing their job. This is exactly why companies should be broken up. They can currently afford doing a lot of anti-competitive stuff just because another department is profitable while the anti-competitive methods/departments won't. That people would lose their job shouldn't be a consideration as they can surely find jobs elsewhere that won't exploit the public like Google have been proven to do here.
- Infinitesimus 5y ago
  Companies should be allowed to dabble in unprofitable things as they wish. The need for everything to be profitable is why Google got into selling Ads and also why they keep killing projects. Many things in the world worth doing don't nearly fit into a nice profitable business but in many ways, bring some positivity to the world. Android gave many people a chance at a modern smartphone and connected future. Chrome would never be profitable on its own but for a time, it forced web standards to move forward and freed many people from the mess of 1000 virus-laden toolbars in I.E.
  - Closi 5y ago
    Chrome and Android aren’t really about giving users a better experience, that’s just a side effect - they are a way of solidifying their domination of search and ads by owning the full stack. It’s just a big risk-mitigation technique so they can further cement their monopoly for search and ads.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
heavyset_go 5y ago
That means Google is strangling innovation and market efficiency by offering unsustainable products that prevent profitable businesses from entering those markets. Some people might lose their jobs at Google, but a healthier market will allow competition to hire for actually sustainable businesses. The benefits of increased innovation and competition for consumers makes breaking companies like this up worthwhile on their own.
- mola 5y ago
  I think the products are great, but users are trained to not to pay for them.
  - newshorts 5y ago
    I really like their cloud office suite for personal use, however I would not rely on them for an enterprise solution. Probably less about training the users and more about sales/support, feature set and ecosystem as barriers to getting paid.
TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
Not just Google. The entire adtech, social media, and personal data surveillance industry. Effectively it's already one giant company operating under multiple nominal mega-brands.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jjulius 5y ago
Fine, break it up and let the chips fall where they may. So many people on HN like to tout that if businesses don't have a market, or a product people want, or whatever, then they should fail. Why should Alphabet's numerous companies be any different? There would be a net benefit to the world that would absolutely outweigh the collateral damage of that relatively small handful of people losing their jobs.

awild 5y ago

Wouldn't this be eventually a good thing? I imagine less free online services, which would condition people to also pay online more often. It would be a bumpy road, but I can see how online magazines could make more money that way, since I'm already used to paying for my online office suite, mail etc. It could also just lead to weird tie-in with a central ad service sharing anonymized data between all participating companies, basically spreading the data Google monopolizes further.

flyinglizard 5y ago

I can see at least five entirely separate units with very little synergy: 1. Search + Maps 2. GSuite + Gmail 3. GCP 4. YouTube 5. Android + Chrome Each can probably support its own P&L sheet, other than perhaps the last (not sure about that one). Such a move would surely limit innovation (I can’t see these smaller entities doing things like mobile ASIC development, although if TPU is under Search it would continue), but increase competition, especially in the ad market.

capableweb 5y ago
> Such a move would surely limit innovation [...] but increase competition Wouldn't increasing competition also increase innovation as more companies can actually enter the market with new ideas? Sure, the innovation at Google itself might go down, but that should hardly be an argument against solving their anti-competitive behavior.
- flyinglizard 5y ago
  There are some things requiring capital investment at a scale that wouldn’t be feasible for a company outside the 100bn market cap club. Data centers, intercontinental data links, high end VLSI development, high end smartphone hardware and things like Waymo all come to mind. It’s more than cash alone, it’s low cost nature of their mistakes (because everything is paid for by Search anyway) that enables that.
  - kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
    With more companies competing, there will be more innovation overall.
xmprt 5y ago
I think Chrome being the largest browser provider could make big profits from partnering with other search providers to make one the default search engine.
mrweasel 5y ago
The only two of those I’m pretty sure could survive on their own is search and YouTube. Android and Chrome pretty much doesn’t have a business case. GCP might be big enough at this point, but is still just burning ad money. GSuite/GMail is again a maybe, but can it afford the infratructure? They would at least have to cribble the free tier.
- darkwater 5y ago
  > Android and Chrome pretty much doesn’t have a business case. The 30% fee on everything Play Store seems a good enough business case to me.
  - emn13 5y ago
    But it's also fragile; that fee might not turn out to be sustainable.
    - darkwater 5y ago
      How come? Also they already have a dominant position, producer licensing can go a long way. Nobody is gonna make Android suddenly irrelevant in the next 10 years.
      - emn13 5y ago
        As the epic vs. apple showdown shows, the position of gatekeeper is potentially legally tricky. Additionally, google works as a gatekeeper now because handset makers kind of need googles blessing. But android is open source, and potentially forkable. What really keeps handset makers onboard are the google services. But... if you split google, are those handset makers really going to feel as beholden to the android play store if they can get all major apps to run on an alternate store (already the case), and can get access to essentially all google apps without giving the android store any cut (after all, those aren't part of a single "google" bundle anymore then!) I suspect the 30% cut would have to go; that super-high margin is really a bit of rent-seeking behavior even today, and only sustainable due to Google's overall market position. It's so high that the case could be made that e.g. Samsung's efforts to duplicate it is merited solely as a form of negotiating leverage, rather than as an actual alternative today. Without the whole consumer lock-in and bundle deal that google provides today, androids value proposition is much, much weaker; they could simply offer additional stores with better pricing, and wait for android to come begging for scraps. Android the platform is certainly here to stay for a while, but as a business unit, assuming it were split from the rest of google? I'm less certain. I mean, I wouldn't count them out, but there are definitely competitors around that would gladly eat their lunch, and might actually succeed then too.
7952 5y ago
That broadly equates to... 1. Ads 2. Corporate 3. Cloud infrastructure 4. Ads 5. Retail app sales and hardware. Maybe things get messy when those different models are mixed.
emn13 5y ago
Though this isn't is a bad idea, if we really want to avoid the inefficiencies stemming from monopolies, we need to not just break up by business unit, but even more so ensure those business units are not themselves little monopolies. That would likely mean breaking up the units too; i.e. not just 1 search provider, but at least two; not just 1 android but at least two, etc. Having each smaller niche served by its own monopoly is perhaps better than having just 1 monopoly with a larger niche, but it'll still just converge towards today's ever more feudal society. There is 0 polical interest in dealing with that though, and it would be a really tricky issue - after all, if you're serious about wanting to support capitalism, google is by no means the only company that needs to go. It would mean a fairly dramatic restructuring of the corporate landscape, and you'd need to have answers for scenarios where economies of scale are so lucrative, they outweigh the benefits of competition (would those be non-profits with multiple competing clients?) Also, the laws around intangible value (i.e. intellectual property) are pretty much designed for monopolization. Finally, we don't live in a vacuum; how will you deal with transnational corporations, and specifically with overseas monopolies that can play off the now smaller intra-national non-monopolists against each other? As tax-avoidance schemes have shown, corporate structures can get quite complex, so it's quite possible some kind of mutually dependent franchise system might develop with the true ownership still centralized and monopolistic - but external. All in all, the path towards the idealized capitalist system seems implausibly long. We're going to want ways of mitigating the damage before we get there, and that implies ways of dealing with these kind of non-capitalist entities in non-capitalist ways; perhaps a special huge-size tax and a more interventionist state. And even that seems like wishful thinking in today's political climate...
tradertef 5y ago
How about admob/adsense? The whole point of the article was about those units..

capableweb 5y ago

> Other than search and ads, I doubt other part would do particular well. Breaking up Google would result in a lot of people losing their job. This is exactly why companies should be broken up. They can currently afford doing a lot of anti-competitive stuff just because another department is profitable while the anti-competitive methods/departments won't. That people would lose their job shouldn't be a consideration as they can surely find jobs elsewhere that won't exploit the public like Google have been proven to do here.

Infinitesimus 5y ago
Companies should be allowed to dabble in unprofitable things as they wish. The need for everything to be profitable is why Google got into selling Ads and also why they keep killing projects. Many things in the world worth doing don't nearly fit into a nice profitable business but in many ways, bring some positivity to the world. Android gave many people a chance at a modern smartphone and connected future. Chrome would never be profitable on its own but for a time, it forced web standards to move forward and freed many people from the mess of 1000 virus-laden toolbars in I.E.
- Closi 5y ago
  Chrome and Android aren’t really about giving users a better experience, that’s just a side effect - they are a way of solidifying their domination of search and ads by owning the full stack. It’s just a big risk-mitigation technique so they can further cement their monopoly for search and ads.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

heavyset_go 5y ago

That means Google is strangling innovation and market efficiency by offering unsustainable products that prevent profitable businesses from entering those markets. Some people might lose their jobs at Google, but a healthier market will allow competition to hire for actually sustainable businesses. The benefits of increased innovation and competition for consumers makes breaking companies like this up worthwhile on their own.

mola 5y ago
I think the products are great, but users are trained to not to pay for them.
- newshorts 5y ago
  I really like their cloud office suite for personal use, however I would not rely on them for an enterprise solution. Probably less about training the users and more about sales/support, feature set and ecosystem as barriers to getting paid.

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago

Not just Google. The entire adtech, social media, and personal data surveillance industry. Effectively it's already one giant company operating under multiple nominal mega-brands.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

jjulius 5y ago

Fine, break it up and let the chips fall where they may. So many people on HN like to tout that if businesses don't have a market, or a product people want, or whatever, then they should fail. Why should Alphabet's numerous companies be any different? There would be a net benefit to the world that would absolutely outweigh the collateral damage of that relatively small handful of people losing their jobs.