I bet a significant chunk of folks reading this have a recurring charge from Google for extra storage, compute, hosting, YouTube, etc.
Google became really good at nickel/diming people
Why are Amazon or Microsoft going to be forced to compete on cost in six months?
When you are already into some combination of Office, Windows desktops, Active Directory, .NET, SQL Server, Github Copilot, then Azure feels like the natural cloud transition.
Does the phrasing imply that Google sees itself as #1 and Nvidia as a close #2 that may rival its greatness? not to mention other big contenders.
But sure, if you want to buy AI tokens, you win.
This is one of those things capitalists tell themselves so they can keep believing the shtick. This is a good example of "head in the sand on purpose" thinking.
I so hope that Google goes down. (And I pray the same for Facebook and a couple others).
At this rate, you'll hate Apple for making iPhones so damn good, or Starlink for giving really good internet access.
You line of thinking is - gosh, these companies are providing an excellent service, and I hate them for that?
The incentive for Apple or Microsoft is to make a good product that you will gladly pay for. This is very different.
A good restaurant makes an excellent product bit it doesn't mean that I will spend 5 hours there.
I know, I know, it’s really hard having these insights. We all have our crosses to bear. <giggling emoji>
From the pure software side, Macromedia got acquired. RedHat was doing fine before IBM gobbled it up. But I honestly can't remember any other "picks and shovels" software companies from pre-dotcom.
It's actually really hard for the aristocracy to end up in a Florida trailer park.
Selling picks and shovels after the gold rush is a terrible idea.
They have the power to do what exactly? Sell you some EC2 instances at reasonable prices? lol
There’s organizations that have the power to openly kidnap and execute people and we’re being melodramatic about a few buildings with computers in them
Did you see any clips from Trumps inauguration? Weren’t the CEOs of these big tech companies sitting right behind him?
Shall we even talk about Palantir?
I think it’s pretty obvious what the power of these companies are. You have to have your head pretty deep in the tech hole to think this is just about fair ec2 pricing. What I’d do to have that kind of ignorance again.
Like banana companies?
Doing the whole "it's both sides, really" thing after Russia invaded Ukraine just makes them look like useful idiots.
To the extent that governments work against the people, it is largely because people in some countries are collectively very stupid and willingly support such governments.
I don’t understand how this is even a remote comparison lol
If we’re worried about power there are other much scarier organizations to criticize first
You can hyper-target your ad or scam to vulnerable individual.
Unlike traditional media, like newspaper, you can post an ad with no visibility outside your target group -- which is hard to discover.
The report button is just some generic "second look" and automation within the same organization, there are no oversight.
Why?
We need new antitrust laws and heavy taxes just on the megacorps worth $500B or more. And aggressive enforcement.
The problem is how to get to the point where there is enforcement.
It definitely isn't going to happen with Republicans in power, and it also isn't a sure thing with Democrats in power either.
Lina Khan was a good start for a bit there, but she certainly didn't have universal Dem support. Establishment Democrats are going to have to grow a spine and tell the Reid Hoffmanesque donor class to get fucked.
I much rather deal with Azure than the complexity maze of AWS products, IAM configurations, primitive Web based IDE tooling and shell.
Amazon would never had come up with something like VSCode, which was born as the Azure Web IDE.
A bunch of config management DSL startups, and web scale data storage solutions, not so much
Google entered the competition in AI products late. And now they will use their power unfairly to try and make it win. When they bundle an AI Chatbot into their existing contracts for Google workspace, they are competing unfairly. When the Chrome browser steers you towards Google properties by default, they are competing unfairly. Etc. Those unfair monopolistic actions let them come into the market years late with a viable competitor to ChatGPT or other products.
And let’s not give them too much credit for transformers. A handful of researchers were paid by Google while they came up with that paper. Google didn’t really do anything to push for it and neither Google leaders nor shareholders cared much about it at the time. Not to mention, transformers themselves were just a continuation of other prior steps in ML, from what I’ve read.
That's exactly how fundamental research works.
Transformers is possibly the most significant advancement in machine learning since AlexNet.
Bundling products is valid but different critism.
And then I can't really remember many Internet-focused software pick&shovels companies from that era. I was only starting my professional career at that time, though.
Nortel - dead
Global crossing - dead
Netscape - dead (server) and/or dying (Mozilla)
Intel - almost dead
Palm - dead
Qualcomm - still around
Who else? Borland quietly withered away, but it had never been focused on tools specifically for the Internet.
Every iPhone that people buy gives direct money to Apple, centralizing their power. This means, they get to dictate what apps can / cannot run on the device.
So what? Nobody is forcing anyone to buy iPhones. Similarly, nobody is forcing anyone to install Google Analytics, or go to that website.
> Wasn’t it just a few months ago that a big tech CEO used his powers to gain access to all the US government data he wanted
You’re so close! The organization you want to criticize here is the government. Hope that helps :)
“You don’t need to worry bout them Palantir boys, they just make simple harmless dashboards. Don’t worry about the deep involvement in government surveillance, military targeting, and immigration enforcement.”
“Amazon just provides simple VMs. Ain’t no need to be concerned about worker treatment, anti-competitive practices, tax avoidance, and environmental impact.”
Is that it?
Everyone practices tax avoidance, there’s nothing wrong with it. If you don’t like it then adjust the tax code
That said, from all the informed takes I've seen, Lina Khan was seriously... flawed (putting it charitably) in her strategy and tactics. To the extent that some observers wondered if she was deliberately sabotaging the agency just to highlight the need for new, more effective laws. She did have a novel theory of consumer harm, but that requires new legislation to enforce. Instead the way she went about it -- including by flouting due process -- was extremely counter-productive.
That was a big reason she was neither very effective in her goals (other than creating a lot of noise) nor have high political support from any side.
Nothing noble about that stance, that's continuing to feed the Big Tech monster.
They are very much part of the problem that needs to be solved and they didn't like that she was starting to push for the solutions.
Azure seems to be relying on constant human intervention, the other 2 didn't get a special mention from Pentagon. There was a recent insider article cycle on just how broken and misguided the whole Azure department is.
Just like every Google service only bots, and the most expensive to actually get humans to talk to.
AWS, it is a maze of products, IAM a pain to deal with, tooling for doing serverless directly from Webshell relatively painfull,....
I bet insider articles from AWS and GCP would be quite similar in quality, especially given how much they do in offshoring.
Like how my local supermarket prefers hiring teenagers.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2019/09/...
Looks like they collected some metrics. I’m fine with this
They turned this into "search".
Every brand or product has to competitively bid for its own identity in a monopoly competitive bidding market.
It's downright evil.
Look at Google's AI rivals having to spend hundreds of millions just so customers can find them. Google Anthropic or OpenAI and see what you get.
The next admin needs to break Google up horizontally (not vertically) into competing browsers, clouds, and search products. They all need to fight. Healthy capitalism is fiercely competitive. Not whatever this invasive species that preys on everything else is.
They also need to make it illegal to place ads for registered trademarks. The EU should get in on that too.
That sounds great if you're rich and can afford to pay for all the million subscriptions that will pop up to replace what Google offers.
Google offers an insane amount of value to people for free: YouTube, Android, Google Search, Trends, Scholar, Maps, Chrome, Translate, Gmail. These would all be paid subscription products without adsense (or some equivalent). And as paid products they would get the typical subscription enshittification over time.
Also, on the topic of AI: didn't the transformers research paper come from Google? In an alternate world that would've been a trade secret locked away inside Google.
That's false.
There are hundreds of free offerings in this and many other spaces offered by lots of other companies.
There does not have to be one monopoly controlling all of it for the freemium model and advertising to work.
I frequently see calls to not intervene if there's not bulletproof evidence of existing abuse, but why wait? Would you want Google to own a bunch of nuclear missiles just because they might not have misused them yet?
He can be removed from office by Congress after the midterms if the population shows up to vote for that happening. They won't, of course, because the American people as a whole do not want him removed from office, but the mechanism is there.
He will also probably stand for re-election, and if he does he probably will win despite it being in violation of the constitution, because by all accounts the American people collectively prefer the concept of Supreme Leader Trump to the scrap of toilet paper that is their constitution. That is the nature of democracy. It gives the people what they want, even if what they want is very stupid and harmful to themselves.
That surely would work very very well in society. Literally the same thing is happening with Google, Facebook, TikTok etc.
You probably work for bigtech and your salary depends on people losing their braincells so I don't expect you to suddenly get some ethics and understand all of this.
There definitely isn't a YouTube replacement. You might say that there are video sites and that's true, but there aren't any that also offer 55% of the revenue to the creator, let alone that being enough to really have a creator economy.
Most browsers these days are Chromium based or are essentially funded by these big tech companies (eg Mozilla).
Google search and translate do have alternatives, especially these days with LLMs doing a lot of the latter.
What are some of the free email providers? I'm genuinely curious, because I know some exist, but I'm unfamiliar with most of them.
Are the free Maps alternatives good?
Make Google give up Android (which is Linux based) and watch an entire industry pop up.
> There definitely isn't a YouTube replacement. You might say that there are video sites and that's true, but there aren't any that also offer 55% of the revenue to the creator, let alone that being enough to really have a creator economy.
TikTok creators earn 70-90%
Twitch creators make 50-70%.
Split YouTube into ten video websites and watch a robust, de-consolidated economy sprout.
> Most browsers these days are Chromium based or are essentially funded by these big tech companies (eg Mozilla).
This is the most heinous of all because it's the insidious linchpin behind Google's evil empire. It's the starting point of the funnel Google makes all of its "search" revenue from. (I say "search" because when I type in "openai", I know what I want, but Google gives me something different and forces that player into an expensive bidding war.)
Google didn't build the browser. That was originally KHTML and then taken over by Apple. They lifted it, used Embrace-Extend-Extinguish, and launched a tracking/search ad funnel/anti-adblock empire.
Every google search result compels you to download Chrome if you aren't using it. It's the default on Android. They warn you if you're using Firefox.
When you can spend billions to dump on the browser market you can do things like this. It's especially heinous since they reinvested their ill-gotten ad dragnet gains back into the engine that powered their empire.
Google needs to have Chrome stripped from them. Period. They cannot have a browser now or ever.
Firefox is their antitrust litigation sponge. They happily pay the stooges there to chug along and waste money.
Brave can and will easily fill this void when Google is forced out.
> What are some of the free email providers? I'm genuinely curious, because I know some exist, but I'm unfamiliar with most of them.
Microsoft, Yahoo. You used to be able to run your own before Google platformized email.
> Are the free Maps alternatives good?
Yes. Apple Maps is shockingly good. Turns out competition is good.
If Google is forced out, there will be lots of competition.
I don't expect consumers to understand this, but I do expect regulators to get it. And I want more regulators to take up the mantle against Google.
Google is highly anti-competitive and drastic measures need to be taken to restore a cutthroat capitalist environment that is maximally beneficial to the economy.
I guess that would be when Apple takes over smartphones entirely.
>TikTok creators earn 70-90%
>Twitch creators make 50-70%.
They don't get that revenue split from ads. They either match YouTube or give less depending on the size of the channel.
>Split YouTube into ten video websites and watch a robust, de-consolidated economy sprout.
We had 10+ video websites simultaneously before YouTube. The videos were all lower quality, limited in length, and obviously no revenue share. Only YouTube grew out of them to become YouTube and it was because of a superior product.
>This is the most heinous of all because it's the insidious linchpin behind Google's evil empire.
Google didn't make me switch to Chrome, Mozilla did. One day they decided to rework the UI, which broke my add-ons. And then they decided that I'm not allowed to use my own add-ons without permission from Mozilla.
Using my own add-ons with Chrome (or chromium-based browsers) was no problem.
Also, Mozilla mucked up the mobile browser thing themselves. Their scroll felt extremely wrong to use for years. Every other application on my phone scrolled in one way, but somehow Firefox did not. Eventually they fixed it, but that took a long time.
I'm not opposed to using Firefox, but they themselves pushed me away.
>Brave can and will easily fill this void when Google is forced out.
You think Google is going to continue building Chromium if they can't have Chrome?
???
>Microsoft, Yahoo. You used to be able to run your own before Google platformized email.
So one tech giant instead of the other? What's the difference?
>Yes. Apple Maps is shockingly good. Turns out competition is good.
Great if you're in the apple ecosystem, I guess, but that's, again, switching from one tech giant to another. In this case it would be switching into a company known for building walled-gardens. I don't see how this would improve the situation at all.
>I don't expect consumers to understand this, but I do expect regulators to get it. And I want more regulators to take up the mantle against Google.
Get what? That regulators should go after one tech giant so that their customers are forced to swap to the products of... other tech giants?
I'm not here to defend Google, but I feel like you might want to think about this some more. Your answers basically just suggested other tech giants or Brave (which relies on Google still contributing to chromium). Being stuck in Apple's walled garden doesn't sound great to me considering how expensive all their stuff is.