Such a blerg nothing company with almost no innovation sitting on a cash volcano that never stops erupting.
I often think about what an incredible bargain YouTube was at $1 billion.
Such a blerg nothing company with almost no innovation sitting on a cash volcano that never stops erupting.
I often think about what an incredible bargain YouTube was at $1 billion.
They have completely monopolized access. I was thinking am a weird exception for not ranking for the exact name/domain of my product until I have met a couple other entrepreneurs who have names/domains and still don't rank first but instead some other random website will show up.
So just the simple fact of "existing" on the Internet now costs money. Not only that, with their ads, you can target competitors search names. So you need to outbid your competitors so that your users don't get directed to your competitors by "accident". When I lost uBlock last month, I was surprised how many sites buy ads for their own names.
> So just the simple fact of "existing" on the Internet now costs money. Not only that, with their ads, you can target competitors search names. So you need to outbid your competitors so that your users don't get directed to your competitors by "accident".
To be clear, they have been doing this for so long I was first told it by a friend in the travel sector almost 20 years ago, along with the explanation of why this ends up absorbing a frightening proportion of the spare money in the economy.
The whole reason Google had such a nightmare over Facebook was FB is the only thing that broke their monopoly on this, which is why FB also prints money.
Makes sense they are concerned about losing the "browser" because it's no longer about the search/service quality and more about holding the platform that most people use for access.
It's interesting that not many investors sees this and there is little investment in an alternative browser. It is literally a software worth hundreds of billions of $$$. I hate Sam Altman as an individual but I have to admit that he could see it which is probably why he tried to grab "chrome" when an opportunity presented itself.
> I often think about what an incredible bargain YouTube was at $1 billion.
It's hard to tell if it's actually turning over a profit when they only report revenue for it.
Simple math proves that wrong. You don't make billions doing nothing.
Google is definitely not doing nothing. A lot of smart people are there who work very hard.
But, as a Google employee for about a decade at this point, I really do think that the company is trash when it comes to planning and coordination and is getting worse at it over time. I think that there are a lot of things it never really needed to learn how to do because the ads money is just so outrageous.
Like the resource curse for companies that stumble on a cash spigot. Still, maybe that's fine, because they wouldn't exist otherwise. Just don't expect too much from them outside that?
I wish they'd just spin out more companies so they could rise or fall on their own.
almost no innovation? from transformers to alphago to the quantum stuff.
A bit like Xerox, Bell, Kodak or IBM back in the day then?