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This is a theoretical benefit which is directly at odds with the benefits of competition in a healthy market. For google, my observation is the "big kahuna" ben

This is a theoretical benefit which is directly at odds with the benefits of competition in a healthy market. For google, my observation is the "big kahuna" benefit of google basically does not exist and competition needs to be restored. Google is famous for not innovating on anything successfully, they produce graveyards of trash. Instead what they do is buy other companies then enshittify them in an anti competitive dance towards causing more damage than productivity. You really have to think about exactly how our modern markets work and why buyouts are such dominant strategy. It's only sometimes about taking what you buy then using it, it's mostly about taking what you buy to stifle competition these days. Look at twitter and Vine, twitter bought then shut down vine as part of a standard operating procedure just to stifle competition, and they had so little interest in capitalizing on what they bought that it left a market gap so wide TikTok filled it instead. But usually these practices do not leave such big market gaps, usually they simply shut down competition successfully and the buyer wins. Then in many cases if the company owners refuse to be bought out, extreme anti-competitive practices begin to destroy their business, which will not be punished until long after the victims get shut down. So owners need to choose between a huge pay out, or their company getting destroyed. Owners tend to choose the former.

teleforce 2y ago
> "big kahuna" benefit of google basically does not exist I just given you the deep learning and transformer benefits. There's a reason why the darling of AI Renaissance namely transformer was not invented at MIT, Stanford or Berkeley.
akoboldfrying 2y ago
>Google is famous for not innovating on anything successfully PageRank Gmail Maps MapReduce Chrome Protocol Buffers Go
- teractiveodular 2y ago
  Maps was technically an acquisition (Where2). But like YouTube, Doubleclick, Google Docs (Writely), Translate (Word Lens), Google Flights (ITA) and many others, Google successfully grew these products into giants.
  - akoboldfrying 2y ago
    I didn't know Maps (or Google Docs, or Translate) were acquisitions, thanks.
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    >Maps was technically an acquisition (Where2) Technically, but it's morphed so much that it doesn't even resemble its former self. I remember when Google Maps first came out and showed AJAX technology, so obviously superior to the competitors at the time like MapQuest. However, these days Google Maps is really more of a business directory with navigation, and it wasn't like that in the early days: you needed an address to navigate to.
- dehrmann 2y ago
  Didn't some of the early GPT work come out of Google?
  - blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
    The popular transformer paper, which went on to be used in things like ChatGPT, was authored by Google employees. But “come out of Google” is giving the organization too much credit and the individual too little. Also transformers were themselves a continuation of prior work like multi head attention. And it is possible that transformers were not needed - see this discussion from the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41732853 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41732853
    - tgma 2y ago
      Come on... that's so unfair. There is a reason such individuals chose to work at Google and not Apple or Amazon for example and were able to "individually" come up with such work without being pestered by their management to do other stuff.
- kolinko 2y ago
  Gmail was revolutionary at the start, but stopped innovating 10 years ago - why don’t we still have a good search engine within it? MapReduce would be invented anyway (I implemented it from scratch before learning of it’s existence). Chrome is just a slightly upgraded Firefox (and novadays Safari is just as good if not better with ai) PageRank was what gave Google monopoly, it’s not a result of monopoly. Go - I can give you that. ProtoBuf - not my field, but isn’t it just a format that someone else would develop to fill a niche? (unlike say mp3 that had new compression algorithms baked in) Maps - I can give you that. Some people might argue that it was an acquisition, but without Google’s muscle, Street View would not be feasible.
  - nine_k 2y ago
    > Chrome is just a slightly upgraded Firefox Wat. It's like saying that an apple is a slightly upgraded orange. I would understand if you mentioned KHTML and Safari as relatives, but "slightly upgraded" does not fit anyway. > PageRank was what gave Google monopoly I don't think so. PageRank has been successfully implemented elsewhere, and outmatched. What helped Google build a monopoly was the first mover advantage, the network effects, and the incessant streams of money from AdWords (invented by Google), DoubleClick (acquired) and a bunch of other advertisement tools. > Maps - I can give you that. Don't :) Google Maps is an acquisition from 20 years ago. (As is Android, AdSense, and many other core flagship products of the Google brand.) If you want a relatively recent, successful Google service for general public, it's Google Photos.
    - whitehexagon 2y ago
      >If you want a relatively recent, successful Google service for general public, it's Google Photos. I seem to recall that followed the acquisition of Picasa.
      - nine_k 2y ago
        Picasa was rather different: it had a desktop client, had tags, did not have a dedicated view mode, etc. It ran as a separate product, and then was shut down, not integrated. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picasa https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picasa
- porridgeraisin 2y ago
  Comparing the innovations of Bell Labs with..... _Protobuf_ of all things makes me gag.
  - akoboldfrying 2y ago
    Gag if you want to gag, but I'm not comparing anything with Bell Labs. I'm giving evidence that the claim I quoted is false.
- treyd 2y ago
  Go you can hardly call an innovation. All of the ideas existed previously, and it's a poor execution on those ideas for reasons that have been discussed on HN at length before. They created it to serve their own needs in conditioning the labor market to make their hiring process easier.
  - kajecounterhack 2y ago
    Gosh this is pretty unfair to Rob Pike and Ken Thompson. A lot of infrastructure companies have benefitted from Go the same way Google has, for the same reasons. Typical HN comment writing off significant thoughtfulness as "not an innovation" lol
jonas21 2y ago
> Google is famous for not innovating on anything successfully, they produce graveyards of trash. - AlphaFold (just won a Nobel prize) - Transformers (the "T" in GPT) - Waymo (autonomous vehicles) - Sycamore (quantum computing) These are just a few off the top of my head. If your idea of innovation is a better RSS reader, then sure, I agree with you. But in terms of things that push the forefront of technology, I have a hard time thinking of another company with greater impact in recent years.

teleforce 2y ago

> "big kahuna" benefit of google basically does not exist I just given you the deep learning and transformer benefits. There's a reason why the darling of AI Renaissance namely transformer was not invented at MIT, Stanford or Berkeley.

akoboldfrying 2y ago

>Google is famous for not innovating on anything successfully PageRank Gmail Maps MapReduce Chrome Protocol Buffers Go

teractiveodular 2y ago
Maps was technically an acquisition (Where2). But like YouTube, Doubleclick, Google Docs (Writely), Translate (Word Lens), Google Flights (ITA) and many others, Google successfully grew these products into giants.
- akoboldfrying 2y ago
  I didn't know Maps (or Google Docs, or Translate) were acquisitions, thanks.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  >Maps was technically an acquisition (Where2) Technically, but it's morphed so much that it doesn't even resemble its former self. I remember when Google Maps first came out and showed AJAX technology, so obviously superior to the competitors at the time like MapQuest. However, these days Google Maps is really more of a business directory with navigation, and it wasn't like that in the early days: you needed an address to navigate to.
dehrmann 2y ago
Didn't some of the early GPT work come out of Google?
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  The popular transformer paper, which went on to be used in things like ChatGPT, was authored by Google employees. But “come out of Google” is giving the organization too much credit and the individual too little. Also transformers were themselves a continuation of prior work like multi head attention. And it is possible that transformers were not needed - see this discussion from the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41732853 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41732853
  - tgma 2y ago
    Come on... that's so unfair. There is a reason such individuals chose to work at Google and not Apple or Amazon for example and were able to "individually" come up with such work without being pestered by their management to do other stuff.
kolinko 2y ago
Gmail was revolutionary at the start, but stopped innovating 10 years ago - why don’t we still have a good search engine within it? MapReduce would be invented anyway (I implemented it from scratch before learning of it’s existence). Chrome is just a slightly upgraded Firefox (and novadays Safari is just as good if not better with ai) PageRank was what gave Google monopoly, it’s not a result of monopoly. Go - I can give you that. ProtoBuf - not my field, but isn’t it just a format that someone else would develop to fill a niche? (unlike say mp3 that had new compression algorithms baked in) Maps - I can give you that. Some people might argue that it was an acquisition, but without Google’s muscle, Street View would not be feasible.
- nine_k 2y ago
  > Chrome is just a slightly upgraded Firefox Wat. It's like saying that an apple is a slightly upgraded orange. I would understand if you mentioned KHTML and Safari as relatives, but "slightly upgraded" does not fit anyway. > PageRank was what gave Google monopoly I don't think so. PageRank has been successfully implemented elsewhere, and outmatched. What helped Google build a monopoly was the first mover advantage, the network effects, and the incessant streams of money from AdWords (invented by Google), DoubleClick (acquired) and a bunch of other advertisement tools. > Maps - I can give you that. Don't :) Google Maps is an acquisition from 20 years ago. (As is Android, AdSense, and many other core flagship products of the Google brand.) If you want a relatively recent, successful Google service for general public, it's Google Photos.
  - whitehexagon 2y ago
    >If you want a relatively recent, successful Google service for general public, it's Google Photos. I seem to recall that followed the acquisition of Picasa.
    - nine_k 2y ago
      Picasa was rather different: it had a desktop client, had tags, did not have a dedicated view mode, etc. It ran as a separate product, and then was shut down, not integrated. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picasa https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picasa
porridgeraisin 2y ago
Comparing the innovations of Bell Labs with..... _Protobuf_ of all things makes me gag.
- akoboldfrying 2y ago
  Gag if you want to gag, but I'm not comparing anything with Bell Labs. I'm giving evidence that the claim I quoted is false.
treyd 2y ago
Go you can hardly call an innovation. All of the ideas existed previously, and it's a poor execution on those ideas for reasons that have been discussed on HN at length before. They created it to serve their own needs in conditioning the labor market to make their hiring process easier.
- kajecounterhack 2y ago
  Gosh this is pretty unfair to Rob Pike and Ken Thompson. A lot of infrastructure companies have benefitted from Go the same way Google has, for the same reasons. Typical HN comment writing off significant thoughtfulness as "not an innovation" lol

jonas21 2y ago

> Google is famous for not innovating on anything successfully, they produce graveyards of trash. - AlphaFold (just won a Nobel prize) - Transformers (the "T" in GPT) - Waymo (autonomous vehicles) - Sycamore (quantum computing) These are just a few off the top of my head. If your idea of innovation is a better RSS reader, then sure, I agree with you. But in terms of things that push the forefront of technology, I have a hard time thinking of another company with greater impact in recent years.