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The impact on google losing $10m of revenue is exactly equal to the impact of John Doe losing $10m of revenue In a competitive market John Doe would go to one
by ta1243 2y ago
The impact on google losing $10m of revenue is exactly equal to the impact of John Doe losing $10m of revenue
In a competitive market John Doe would go to one of googles competitors. We don't have a competitive market. We have winner takes all market.
- giancarlostoro 2y agoSure, its $10m today, but think of all the other potential startups that they're doing this to, and how many millions they're throwing away, and billions over the long haul. Reddit, Twitter, and company all got big because they had open APIs and people were able to use them extensively for really creative things. I agree, Google has swallowed up the video streaming market unfortunately. I keep thinking back to how Vine was basically TikTok, and they threw it away.
- nemothekid 2y ago>Sure, its $10m today, but think of all the other potential startups that they're doing this to, and how many millions they're throwing away, and billions over the long haul. Google made $300B last year. "billions over the long haul" is a lot of money, an unimaginable amount even, to you and I. But to Google?
- quickthrowman 2y ago> Google made $300B last year. No, Google made $73.795B last year. Revenue is not profit, net income is profit and what you ‘make’ as a company. Revenue is not profit.
- barbecue_sauce 2y agoI mean, they "make" both. "Make" does not imply profit. If you say a company "made" a revenue figure, then you mean it in the revenue sense. It's contextual.
- quickthrowman 2y agoNo, it’s not contextual. “Company X made $N billion dollars” only means one thing, net income.
- nick7376182 2y agoSorry bro it's contextual.
- WesBrownSQL 2y ago100% contextual. In every business where I've been an executive, or had access to the budget, we talk "made" as gross revenue and EBIDA as a stand in gross profit and specifically call out net profit in internal meetings. For example, "We made 10 million with an EBIDA of 1 million and net of 200,000.00." Using EBIDA to talk to potential investors and as a guiding metric if we didn't have a well established gross profit formula that followed GAAP.
- kortilla 2y agoThat’s like saying a trading company made a trillion dollars because you counted all of the securities sales but not the costs.
- eropple 2y agoI don't think that's nearly as universal an assumption as you're claiming. Like--I made $X,000 dollars last year, but I also have a mortgage and like to eat food.
- grugagag 2y agoBy that logic I make what I can save, lol
- ta1243 2y agoWell yes. Companies get to write off expenses of existing People don't
- bryanrasmussen 2y agoright, which if you follow that assumption you can see that things are not as great as you thought.
- kortilla 2y agoMortgage accumulates equity. Bad example
- ta1243 2y agoMortgage interest payments don't Your assets might inflate in value, but that's nothing to do with the mortgage
- g15jv2dp 2y agoEven if we subscribe to this interpretation, the overall point stands.
- thaumasiotes 2y agoRevenue isn't profit, but your wasted business expenditures are properly measured against your revenue. That's what they're spent from.
- bryanrasmussen 2y agoFirst off - how much of revenue usage last year was on fines etc. That is to say profit they could potentially have had. Second there is lots of revenue you use for "business" because you don't want to pay taxes on the profit and anyway it is giving you something you like to have. How much of Google's revenue is used to do things for top executives and people with power in the company that is really something they (the executives) should be taxed on but is instead a business expense of google (cars, transport, 'working' vacations, security, super cool chefs preparing meals at the company...) Hard to say really because if you knew the answer it would actually be something they were taxed on. But it's not 0 - sure probably not a billion, but a couple hundred million splashed around wouldn't surprise me. How much of Google's revenue usage is for wages and other forms of payout to executives etc. (stock) that does not get counted as profit but of course it is amounts those people want to have. Google made $73.795B profit last year, and expensed slightly over 262B - some portion of which the people who run Google no doubt personally thought of the way we would consider profit in our day to day existence, and another portion of which were fines for things they did in getting the rest of the money.
- kortilla 2y agoLiterally none of that is relevant for much the corporate entity made (I.e. what the shareholders got).
- bryanrasmussen 2y agoObviously the fines, which are the first thing mentioned, is relevant for how much the shareholders got. Literally the other stuff is relevant for how remunerative the people who actually run the companies, day-to-day, feel those companies are (put in day-to-day because I got the feeling you might give me a lecture about the shareholders actually running the company)
- xp84 2y agoPersonally I think you have a decent point since in practice employees of GOOG are shareholders too. Although I don’t know if their interests matter to the corporate entity because I don’t know what percentage is held by insiders.
- nemothekid 2y agoThis is a bizarre nitpick. 1. I know it's revenue - the GP says The impact on google losing $10m of revenue 2. Do you think the 10m that Google would have booked from API usage would be booked as pure profit?
- phone8675309 2y agoThose startups are their competitors. You don’t have to pay millions of dollars to acquire a competitor that was never started because of your inconsistent API policy. Google makes enough money that losing several currently non-existent revenue streams that are theoretically $10 million apiece isn’t hurting them. It’s hurting their users. Google is all about ads - why would they give a shit about the users?
- Buttons840 2y agoIt's a testimate to the health of our free market that the company throwing away millions, and billions over the long haul, is the overwhelmingly dominant market leader.
- authorfly 2y agoTake it from someone who watched with interest, Reddit and Twitter did not get big due to open APIs. They got their first big steps before they even had APIs... In the first year of twitters launch it was in the news in the UK at 300k users in press releases about how it was a "new form of communication" etc... 2008 was actually when the original set of API-laden websites began to fade because with the recession, we could not have nice things be free so much. Many API services fell into disrepair in 2009, certainly the peak of APIs for the UK was around 2008. Check out Tom Scotts video on this for a picture of the open API internet many people thought would occur (and which did exist in some places until FAANG began to productise and dominate and use accounts across products which do not incentivize APIs). Yes it is true open network graphs/facebook etc had some API access, but the APIs before were more single purpose and numerous; facebook lets you explore their network and to some extent data, but that's not the same as the useful APIs that became restricted, paid or were cut in the aftermath of the recession.
- littlestymaar 2y agoCompetitive markets are by far more the exception than the rule. It's just not how capitalism works (because pretty much any competitive market is ripe for “consolidation”, which increases aggregate shareholders value by reducing competitive pressure). If you want competitive market in a capitalist economy, then you need very active state enforcement.
- logicchains 2y ago>Competitive markets are by far more the exception than the rule it's just not how capitalism works Empirically this absolutely isn't the case; the majority of listed companies have fairly low margins, especially non-tech companies, which can be trivially seen from their financial statements. A low profit margin means a competitive market (because if it wasn't a competitive market the firm could raise its prices to obtain higher margins).
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dambi0 2y agoMight there be other reasons to report lower profits?
- littlestymaar 2y ago> A low profit margin means a competitive market (because if it wasn't a competitive market the firm could raise its prices to obtain higher margins). Not necessarily: if prices are elastic then even a monopoly can aim for low profit margin (in percentage) in order to increase profit. What matters is how much total profit are being made, margin only matters when measuring risk. Also, corporations are social structures, and low competition also encourage complacency in the corporate structure itself, which drives costs up and reduces profit margin.
- zuckerma 2y ago[flagged]
- damiante 2y agoI was thinking about how to solve this given that one of the primary problems is that of fast, global content distribution. I like the idea of paying people in crypto as part of a ledger transaction to host and serve content, like bittorrent with a crypto payment. Unfortunately I can't also think of a way to prevent such a system from being abused to distribute harmful media such as CP. I guess it's not like this isn't a problem with BitTorrent today though.
- akudha 2y agoRegulation might here - something like minimum mandatory 3 months notice for shutting down the API keys. Considering the average age of our politicians, I doubt they’ll understand what “API” is, much less be willing to take on giant tech corporations even if they did understand the problems
- ElFitz 2y ago> […] much less be willing to take on giant tech corporations […] I’d argue that, on the contrary, it seems to be all the rage lately.
- akudha 2y agoNot really. There is a big difference between making noise and actually doing something about the power of big tech.
- xp84 2y agoYeah, what’s popular is actually to crap all over the first amendment by mandating private companies to allow whatever each politician’s special definition of “free speech” is (but of course probably also not allowing whatever the politician’s definition of “dangerous misinformation” is). As for the actual anticompetitive power of big tech, absolute crickets.
- ElFitz 2y agoAnd yet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41164240 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41164240 It isn't much, but I'd like to see that as a start.
- fsckboy 2y ago>The impact on google losing $10m of revenue is exactly equal to the impact of John Doe losing $10m of revenue no, it's not, see declining marginal utility of wealth https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/12309/concepts/diminishing-marginal-utility-of-income-and-wealth/ https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/12309/concepts/diminishin... https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/lawofdiminishingutility.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/lawofdiminishingutility...
- SenHeng 2y agoAttempted to build a similar thing a few years ago when living in Tokyo. Provide a selection of restaurants within a 1km radius and automagically provide 3 recommendations based on my preferences. We had multiple API providers available, Tabelog, Gurunavi and Hotpepper, all required a paid developer license. We still needed to use the Google maps API to get the user's current location though. This was also just when Google Maps suddenly raised their API pricing. After spending a couple of weekends building a working prototype, we stopped as we couldn't justify the cost of paying multiple API providers for basically 3 guys looking to save 10 mins deciding where to get lunch. Also, this kind of app is a common theme if you frequent meetups in Tokyo. There's always at least 1 person that has built such a thing.
- xp84 2y ago> We still needed to use the Google maps API to get the user's current location though. I’m sure as somebody who actually built a prototype, you understand the situation better than me, but I’m curious: why would just getting the user’s lat/long require anything you’d pay for? Wouldn’t the OS or browser provide that to you?
- SenHeng 2y agoOops. I meant that we were using the maps/places API to get lat/long of the restaurants using the street address from the other API providers, then using that to calculate a 'N mins walk away'. We were just testing the abilities of the various APIs. Google was the only that provided travelling time estimates.