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No, I expect Google to offer free services that serve my every whim until they go bankrupt.
by psbp 14y ago
No, I expect Google to offer free services that serve my every whim until they go bankrupt.
- anon1385 14y agoNobody forced Google to start up all those loss making services -- which they did to gain positive PR or attempt to stifle competition in those markets -- or buy those companies and shut down their existing products.
- atirip 14y agoStifle competiton? Are you serious? All what Google does is destroying other peoples's businesses for fun - see, we have shitload of money and nothing to do, why we just offer that what you offer, but for free - haha looser.
- riffraff 14y agoThe fact that google may not be doing doesn't mean this is isn't a known practice, which is actually punished by the law in some places.
- arrrg 14y agoOffering your product for free (which smaller competitors will often not be able to do) can drive the competition out of business and be anti-competitve (i.e. evil). This is not some absurd thing to say. The only question is whether that happened. (I sort of believe it did, at least on some level.) That doesn’t make Google super-evil in my eyes, but it’s a mark against them.
- icebraining 14y agoThat's essentially saying that being too competitive is anti-competitive, and frankly, I think it's ridiculous. So what if smaller competitors aren't able to provide the same solutions at the same price? Isn't that why it's called competition? The point is to benefit consumers, not to keep inefficient businesses alive by hurting them. That said, I think there's some sense in calling anti-competitive when a player lowers the price temporarily, in order to drive out competitors and jack up the prices afterwards. But that's clearly not what happened here.
- arrrg 14y agoNah, reducing the price and bringing it back up is not necessary. It’s anti-competitive if Google Reader on its own wasn’t profitable and Google nevertheless kept it alive (funding it with money from elsewhere in the company), thus killing competitors.
- icebraining 14y agoThen, does that make Hacker News an anti-competitive move by YCombinator? Does it make Free Software anti-competitive? Maybe it is, but then I say, hurray for the anti-competitives!
- arrrg 14y agoNo, it doesn’t. This isn’t a black and white problem.
- arindone 14y agoAgreed -- anti-competitive law is pretty clear on the fact that scale and market dominance in one market cannot be leveraged to gain significant market share in another market for this exact reason
- icebraining 14y agoThe fact that they have market dominance on another market is immaterial here, they didn't need it to keep Google Reader free. Lots of companies have free online services subsidized by their endeavors, without being dominant. You're posting in one of them right now, for example.
- arindone 14y agoIt is absolutely material in competitive and antitrust law. It's not an issue of interpretation or opinion here -- it's applying the same principles that got Microsoft in trouble in the 90's.
- setrofim_ 14y ago>which they did to gain positive PR or attempt to stifle competition in those markets -- or buy those companies and shut down their existing products or, less cynically, to try them out and see what interest they would generate; shutting them down when the interest was not sufficiently great.
- pekk 14y agoI think I would rather that companies try things out and then shut them down, rather than never trying anything remotely new or different in extreme fear that they might fail.
- dsr_ 14y agoLuckily, at their current profitability that's unlikely to happen until well after your grandchildren are retired.
- Dylan16807 14y agoIs reader really a money drain? The bulk of it is crawling and serving cached text, which is core to google's search anyway.
- darkarmani 14y ago> No, I expect Google to offer free services that serve my every whim until they go bankrupt. Because that was anyone's argument?