[HN Gopher] Google in shock as Samsung considers moving to Bing ...
___________________________________________________________________
Google in shock as Samsung considers moving to Bing as default
search engine
Author : carlycue
Score : 514 points
Date : 2023-04-17 13:09 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sammobile.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sammobile.com)
| qwertox wrote:
| Up until ChatGPT, Bing was meaningless to me; Google Search
| served all my needs. I never had a reason to look over to Bing.
| The only contact I had with it was when something embedded their
| maps.
|
| But now, with the AI integration, even when I tried it and left
| disappointed, Bing is starting to sound interesting.
|
| Then there's how they are starting to integrate AI into their
| other products and putting a lot of good effort in visual design.
| Their products look modern and polished, while Google is "still
| the same old" with their Material Design.
|
| I know they are the most capable engineers and that behind the
| scenes they are building the best quality soft- and hardware, but
| if they don't start to focus on the user again they will no
| longer be the titan they used to be.
| htag wrote:
| > But now, with the AI integration, even when I tried it and
| left disappointed, Bing is starting to sound interesting.
|
| When I try a new feature, and am disappointed, I think
| marketing overhyped it and lose interest. Why do you think
| ChatGPT + Search is a good combo, even after you were
| disappointed when trying it?
| qwertox wrote:
| They are showing that they have a strong interest in
| including it. Sure, it still isn't where I'd like it to be,
| but what does Google have to offer?
|
| Bard is US-only, so not reachable for me, I don't even know
| how or if it is integrated into Google Search. They'd have a
| bigger potential in enriching their search with AI features,
| better search, probably a better AI. At least from what they
| have been publishing during these past two years, they seem
| to have gathered a lot of experience with AI.
|
| In regards to Bing, I felt like you.com had a slightly better
| AI integration.
|
| What ChatGPT lacks are links to related websites. For
| example, give me a links to the documentation of the
| `.into()` trait [0] instead of "only" explaining it to me.
|
| [0] https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/convert/trait.Into.html
| hbn wrote:
| > What ChatGPT lacks are links to related websites. For
| example, give me a links to the documentation of the
| `.into()` trait [0] instead of "only" explaining it to me.
|
| In the recent announcement for plugins they showed off a
| web browsing plugin that allows ChatGPT to search the web,
| read content, and return results with sources cited.
|
| https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt-plugins#browsing
| seydor wrote:
| Samsung has been trying to push that bixby thing on me but if it
| 's bing instead, i d gladly change
| layer8 wrote:
| Magi? What happened to Bard?
| post_break wrote:
| Apple should do the same thing now, twist the knife.
| DeathMetal3000 wrote:
| There's 15 billion reasons they won't.
| NayamAmarshe wrote:
| I don't know how Bing is any better. I tried Bing today and the
| results are awful! The search results page is very bloated and
| there's too much going on everywhere. Too much irrelevant
| information. What surprises me is that they managed to make
| content look like ads, irrelevant and noisy.
|
| Comparing the screens to Brave Search, I'm surprised how good
| Brave Search is. Not only are the results much better, but the UI
| is super-clean! There's only digestible information and no bloat.
| nomel wrote:
| In the crevices of search space, I get more duplicates with
| Bing than with Google. But, I do get duplicates, with both,
| which is insanely infuriating.
| imperialdrive wrote:
| Yah, it is really hard to imagine Bing cleaning itself up. No
| way users don't backlash on Samsung the moment they notice the
| gunky search results. And holy smokes, Teams, it's falling
| apart every new release. Once users have enough of that
| experience they're really going to wonder why they dove in head
| first.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| >Teams, it's falling apart every new release
|
| I've never used Teams, but it is weird to me that non-tech
| people seem to really like it while tech people hate it. Is
| it simply that the tech people are comparing it to slack but
| the non-tech people are comparing it to email/skype/etc.?
| sdze wrote:
| Who cares? People will quickly setup their own default search
| engine. And I guess it will be Google. Google is a household
| name. Nobody in the "real" world cares about this AI crap.
| lasermike026 wrote:
| Could this be because of GPT at OpenAI(MS).
| kernal wrote:
| Google should respond by charging Samsung a healthy licensing fee
| to use Google services and receive security and OS updates. They
| should also re-evaluate their Android licensing model and make it
| free for non commercial applications only.
| hardware2win wrote:
| If Bing will manage to pull it off then the only conclusion to
| draw from this will be: never bet against Microsoft, lol.
| king_magic wrote:
| I mean it is kind of nuts. I didn't have "pretty much switch
| entirely to Bing" on my 2023 search Bingo card, but here we are.
| steve1977 wrote:
| Bingo... I see what you did there...
| detourdog wrote:
| My computer literate but non-technical wife just noticed
| yesterday that google searches are a waste of time compared to
| ChatGPT. Over the course of about six hours it went from this
| thing is amazing to this stupid thing knows I'm on a Mac but
| still refers to F11 keys.
|
| She even got ChatGPT to re-enforce she was on Mac and didn't
| have an F11 key but never got a substitute key to use for Mac
| users. (F11 is volume down on my Mac keyboard.)
| ralfd wrote:
| What does F11 do?
| detourdog wrote:
| Like I say it's volume down on the Mac keyboard. Why she
| was interrogating ChatGPT I don't know. I know she started
| using it to get multi-state reading correlations... then
| she was talking about get it to excel work.
|
| After that I imagine ChatGPT told her to use the F11 for
| something and she noticed she didn't have one. I believe at
| that point she started to try to get ChatGPT to tell her
| which key was the F11 on a Mac. She told it she was on Mac
| and didn't have an F11 key. ChatGPT agreed she was on a Mac
| and didn't have one.
|
| I believe that is far as the conversation went. It was
| interesting to me becuase it is commonly available
| information but the answer just couldn't happen.
| tough wrote:
| I dunno but in a mac kb you just press fn (down left) while
| the special function keys, to have them act as regular -ol
| f1--12 keys
| rvba wrote:
| > Google Magi's initial launch will be only in the US, with a
| maximum of one million users. Later, by the year's end, it will
| expand to 30 million users.
|
| It seems they never learned from the failed launches like Google
| Wave or Google Plus. Where you couldnt use them and by the time
| you and your friends got them the hype allready wore off.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| People want LLM leveraged search, and Google isn't delivering.
| AniseAbyss wrote:
| [dead]
| abudabi123 wrote:
| With the aim of making premium margins from hw/sw products better
| than Apple without Microsoft, the partnership of Google,
| Mercedes-Benz, Sony could go far with top cover and Nintendo's
| superpower patience and as a key point of difference promise to
| re-supply parts without short fast fashion half lives. I fail to
| understand how Microsoft gets away with huge market monopoly
| without correction from parliamentarians confining them to one
| third or two of industry dominance.
| tapoxi wrote:
| What's Sundar's goal for Google? They seem to be aimless since he
| took the helm.
| egeozcan wrote:
| If gods of chaos decide give a future where google completely
| gets broken up a chance, I'd be massively pissed if someone
| doesn't detach google reader and bring it online _just to make
| a point_.
| musictubes wrote:
| There are plenty of good RSS services now. In fact I'd argue
| there is more choice and higher quality now than when Reader
| was around. I use Newsblur as my aggregator and either net
| news wire on my Mac and Unread on my iPhone and ipad. I'm
| glad Google got out of the RSS business.
| egeozcan wrote:
| I know, that's why I said they should revive it just to
| make a point, not that people would prefer it anymore.
| ant6n wrote:
| Well, blogs are dead so bringing back reader won't be all
| that useful.
| nus07 wrote:
| Sundar is a McKinsey consultant who is very pleasant and
| agreeable and can keep a boat steady while maximizing
| shareholder return. Unfortunately there isn't much innovation
| happening . Google needs a Larry Page or Musk like character
| back at the helm.
| oldgradstudent wrote:
| > while maximizing shareholder return.
|
| That's not maximizing shareholder return.
|
| That's locally maximizing shareholder return.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| maximizing returns while minimizing risk.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| "That's locally maximizing shareholder return"
|
| As shareholders jump from ship to ship, there is nothing
| beyond short term shareholder return.
| oldgradstudent wrote:
| Many long term Apple investors view things differently.
| RoyGBivCap wrote:
| I bought Apple, nvidia, google, amd, intel, and motorola
| in 2005.
|
| Apple smoked _all_ of them.
| ur-whale wrote:
| > Sundar is a McKinsey consultant who is very pleasant and
| agreeable and can keep a boat steady
|
| Yep. In fact, he was specifically chose to step in as CEO for
| his meekness : voted most likely to preserve brand value by
| best distracting folks from the evil turn the company had
| taken.
|
| > while maximizing shareholder return.
|
| Nope. He's a 100% static CEO, and he's therefore squandering
| huge amounts of capital and human resources.
|
| That's not what I'd call "maximizing shareholder return".
| Peritract wrote:
| > Google needs a Larry Page or Musk like character
|
| These are not the same kind of character.
| revelio wrote:
| Page is much quieter and more private than Musk. Beyond
| that they're pretty similar in a lot of ways.
| gpt5 wrote:
| They are both highly opinionated founders who are not
| afraid to make unconventional choices on how to run a
| company.
| dvngnt_ wrote:
| I'd rather have a Jobs than Musk
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Google hasn't done jack in terms of innovation since he took
| over. They did close out a few moon shots. but nothing to note.
| philistine wrote:
| It's werid to me that no one has made the self-evident
| comparison: Sundar is like Steve Ballmer was for Microsoft.
|
| Coming in right after the founders and trying to raise the
| moats of the exisiting products instead of creating new moats.
| Google Stadia is a similar failure to Ballmer's late Windows
| Live initiatives.
| m00dy wrote:
| He will be fired very soon
| throwntoday wrote:
| Hopefully. I can't think of a single product that has grown
| because of him so much as in spite of him.
| Zigurd wrote:
| How is that different from everything after Google Search.
| Alphabet is even structured around the idea of not being
| able to pick winners. I can discern some long term strategy
| in Android Automotive and Waymo, but nothing is sacred when
| it comes to cutting off products that are not growing.
| KoftaBob wrote:
| It's one thing to say that Sundar hasn't led Google to
| innovate much in his tenure (I agree there), but to say
| Google hasn't picked any winners since Google Search?
|
| - Gmail (largest email service at 1.5B users)
|
| - YouTube (by far the biggest video sharing platform)
|
| - Android (most used operating system in the world by
| number of devices)
|
| - Google Maps (maps service with the largest userbase)
|
| - YouTube TV
|
| - The whole Google Drive Suite
|
| - Chromecast/Android TV
|
| - Chromebooks (made huge inroads in the k-12 education
| space)
| Zigurd wrote:
| What I mean by "not picking winners" is that Google
| admits they can't foresee, for example, the acquisition
| of YouTube turning into a first-tier social network. Just
| like they could not foresee Orkut and G+ _not_ becoming
| successful social networks.
| throwntoday wrote:
| > Just like they could not foresee Orkut and G+ not
| becoming successful social networks.
|
| They put minimal effort into their products and
| prematurely sunset them if they don't perform well
| enough. Their organization is either so fragmented or
| toxic that they launch products that are competing
| against eachother.
|
| It really does seem like there are only morons at the
| helm. A company with as much resources as Google should
| not continue to fail so badly. My suspicion is as Jobs
| said of Apple during his time away, the company is being
| totally run by the product guys not the engineers.
| KoftaBob wrote:
| Fair, though it seems more like Google just got in their
| own way with G+ by keeping it invite only for waaaaay too
| long.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Not sure. The real question is what the Google founders and
| board want and expect. Sundar is just looking after things for
| them. The reason he got the job is that he was never going to
| do more than that. But you might legitimately ask at this point
| if that's enough. And he's been there long enough that he could
| be replaced without anyone losing too much face. Surround it
| with some corporate euphemisms and get some fresh blood in and
| move on. I would not be surprised if they are already looking
| around.
|
| It worked for Microsoft obviously. This is quite a coup for
| Satya Nadella. And he got that one on merit. MS has no stake in
| Android (they declined to get into that after killing Windows
| Phone). Also, he hit the ground running after Steve Ballmer was
| retired. Not that hard of course after Ballmer but he did a few
| decisive things early on that all seem to have mostly worked
| out. The Linkedin acquisition; fixing .Net, re-establishing MS
| as a bonafide OSS player with the Github acquisition and VS-
| Code. And then making a smart investment in OpenAI which they
| are now riding to success. All great moves.
|
| I'd say, Google is in the same boat right now. Lots of obvious
| potential, an extended period of a bit rudderless performance,
| missed boats, and no clear direction or vision. Fix that and it
| could go somewhere else again. Doing more of the same isn't
| going to be anywhere near good enough. They seem to be stuck
| playing a game of whack-a-mole in terms of strategy and ever
| responding to what others are doing and never quite catching up
| with that instead of initiating things themselves and leading.
| ksec wrote:
| >They seem to be aimless
|
| I would argue for 95% of Google's existence they have been
| pretty much aimless.
| nbar1 wrote:
| Then please provide your argument.
| Arnt wrote:
| Right. They develop services, see which ones attract a large
| audience, and close those that don't.
| https://killedbygoogle.com.
|
| I like it, personally speaking. Google has a lot of power,
| and it's an approach that minimise the use of that power to
| push people around.
| joseph_grobbles wrote:
| Sundar is a caretaker who got credited for simple inertia: The
| momentum in place before he took the reigns were predestined to
| grow earnings for years, but suddenly Pichai gets to pretend
| it's all him.
| Palpatineli wrote:
| Especially compared to Nadella, who shows that someone not from
| the the founders' circle, a corporate ladder climber, can lead
| an IT company with great vision too.
| foobiekr wrote:
| Microsoft dealt with with the too-rich-to-work problem and
| the founders-and-earlies-lost-interest problems in the 80s
| and 90s. "FYIFV" (despite being a bit of a tech urban legend)
| and "Quietly Vesting Disease" (QVD) and all that. They're an
| actual grown up company that knows how to build and vet
| leaders.
|
| Google is not a grown up company - it runs the way a 2nd
| generation dynastic family runs their businesses - haphazard
| and sloppy and entirely surviving because of a cash cow and
| nothing else. Plus, they have a fairly substantial crew with
| "rest and vest" as a mantra at least for the folks I knew
| there prior to 2008..
| kramerger wrote:
| A little bit of everything until they figure out what to do.
|
| Samsung and other OEMs get a lot of crap for how they handle
| android. But they are really the ones driving innovation here.
| piyush_soni wrote:
| That's exactly what I think. I personally also find him very
| uninspiring, it looks like he's basically just 'maintaining'
| the company on auto-pilot mode. No out of the world new ideas,
| and now the company is losing on the very field they were
| seemingly far-far ahead than the rest of the world.
| bowsamic wrote:
| 10 years ago, Google was one of the most exciting companies
| in the world to me, culminating in that amazing Google Chrome
| comic https://www.scottmccloud.com/googlechrome/
|
| Their products and software seemed genuinely inspiring. Now,
| it seems to just be maintenance or death. Seemingly happens
| with all once-loved tech companies to some degree. It's quite
| sad but I guess time moves on. Totally self-inflicted for
| them though, they decided to stop moving forward
| ChatGTP wrote:
| I thought Microsoft was well dead, but hey...here we are.
| bertman wrote:
| That was even 15 years ago (September 2008, time flies...).
| LewisVerstappen wrote:
| No stapler for you!
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| The very nature of how people search is changing.
| Personally, I'm LOVING phind.com, it hits all my buttons of
| what a modern AI inspired SE should be. IMHO someday soon,
| Google will just be the Youtube company. That will be their
| primary thing, and maybe that's good so they can make that
| better so it doesn't fail too.
| moonchrome wrote:
| Meh - using phind a few times so far : -
| regurgitates stuff it hits on a shallow search as
| authoritative response (communicating uncertainty would
| be a great improvement for GPT models but I'm guessing
| that's not going to happen because of shallow RHLF
| preferences) - search index is worse than google
| (eg. I've tried a search where google lands on a good
| solution, phind hits official docs and offers suboptimal
| solution) - produces results slower than I can read
| source - I still need to go to the source for full
| reference or do follow-up (but again it's slow)
|
| Not seeing the value tbh. If it was gpt 3.5 fast with 4
| quality now we might be on to something.
| cma wrote:
| DeepMind's stuff has all been impressive.
| mdorazio wrote:
| 1) where can I use it? Compare this to what's come out of
| OpenAI in the last two years. It's like science fair vs.
| a company making actual tools.
|
| 2) how is it helping Alphabet's bottom line? I haven't
| seen it helping here either.
| mirker wrote:
| Alphafold is open and seems fundamentally transformative
| in the science space. GPT is nice but it's a smart meme-
| generator at the moment. I don't disagree with the impact
| on G's bottom line, though.
| uejfiweun wrote:
| Gonna have to disagree about GPT. I've been using it as a
| tutor to learn ML on the side, and it's literally the
| best tutor I've ever had.
| mirker wrote:
| Sure, I agree they are useful. My objection is it's more
| in the tool category than science, while Alphafold is
| both. There isn't convincing evidence that GPTs are
| pushing what we know; rather, they make it easier to
| process/search what we already know. You could hire an ML
| expert to be your tutor without GPTs and you'd get equal
| or better tutoring, though at a higher price. You can't
| hire people to predict protein folding better than
| Alphafold. It's very convenient that GPTs exist and they
| can provide tons of value, but they're essentially the
| next version of mechanical turk or a domain expert you'd
| hire for contract work except more scalable. The net
| impact of GPTs may also be higher due to how often we use
| text, but I'd rather see a society curing disease, etc.
| than one generating fake books, etc.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| True but they are quite independent of Google from my
| understanding.
| vxNsr wrote:
| Seems his main goal was avoiding getting anything on the
| record.
| ranting-moth wrote:
| Or, if it got on, deleting those records after 24 hours.
| oeoeoe wrote:
| [flagged]
| bushbaba wrote:
| To maximize shareholder value which he's done. He's the balmer
| (but worse) of our generation.
| kccqzy wrote:
| Maybe finally the board will wake up and find a replacement for
| Sundar this year. I thought Googlers were internally very
| unhappy about Sundar for a long time now.
| jdlyga wrote:
| Google got too corporate and played things too safe for too long.
| Imagine if Google released Bard 1 year ago.
| psuresh wrote:
| Microsoft Windows survived thanks to Apple on proprietary OS
| front by not licencing OS separately and Google on open source OS
| front by not pursuing desktop ChromeOS
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Apple used this tactic to put pressure on Google:
|
| 2013: Apple Makes Bing The "Default Search Engine" For Siri
|
| https://searchengineland.com/apple-makes-bing-the-default-se...
|
| 2017: Apple switches from Bing to Google for Siri web search
| results on iOS and Spotlight on Mac
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/25/apple-switches-from-bing-t...
|
| Hard to know if the AI features of Bing are the key factor here
| for Samsung, or just a handy excuse for Samsung to renegotiate
| pricing with Google.
| natch wrote:
| Employees being both arrogant and lazy is quite a corrosive
| dynamic for a company.
| ur-whale wrote:
| The problem with Google is very simple: they have become entirely
| incapable of creating new products (specifically: stuff that
| people actually want).
|
| Most of the tech. that underpins OpenAI's stuff has been invented
| at Google, and quite a long time ago.
|
| They've been sitting on it, not doing anything with it, and even
| when their most direct competitor comes to take a huge pound of
| flesh out using stuff _they_ created, all they manage to do is
| put out a lame subpar competitor (bard).
|
| Things this situation evokes for me: - Google
| plus - Kodak - Xerox
| bagacrap wrote:
| But Microsoft can create new products?
| dboreham wrote:
| How does this happen for me when I use Chrome on my Samsung
| phone?
| nstart wrote:
| A quick note to say that this article is mostly a rehash of the
| New York Times article it references as its source.
| https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/16/technology/google-search-...
| naves wrote:
| I can imaging Apple mulling about the same for iOS. Microsoft is
| on a roll and they have the money to challenge Google's default
| place in our pockets.
| DueDilligence wrote:
| [dead]
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| They will become the next Nokia.
| qrck13 wrote:
| For me that would be a reason to avoid buying Samsung from now
| on. Can't stand bings UI overloaded with visuals that only
| distract you.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| Maybe an unpopular opinion but it feels like Google is near
| useless anymore. Between results containing outdated or broken
| links to empty discussions, and ads being their main priority as
| well as "fuzzy search results" where you can search for one thing
| and get something completely unrelated because Google decided you
| also meant to search for something else that is possibly
| contextually adjacent, I can't really get good results from it
| anymore.
|
| I mean, I can still get answers for simple questions but when it
| comes to anything unique or complex I usually just get frustrated
| and go to duckduckgo or something else. ChatGPT now adays mostly.
|
| Sure ChatGPT can hallucinate but Google's results rely on some
| random person somewhere to have properly answered something. The
| reality of that is so many of the "answers" I find are
| discussions on forums between a bunch of random people who have
| no real credentials or factual answers but instead just opinions
| based on something else they read on Google. People google
| something, read the google blurb about it at the top of the
| results, then go answer other people's questions.
|
| I honestly think Google is losing favor at this point. I've even
| been considering moving away from Android because the OS just
| feels like the Walmart iOS now adays. It features the same
| problems but in a way that nothing is polished versus iOS.
|
| Google needs to stop just following everyone else. Everything now
| adays feels like the ol Google+ move. "Ah, successful product
| someone else made, let's remake it and name it google something!"
| ur-whale wrote:
| > Sure ChatGPT can hallucinate
|
| For the non-ML crowd out there, in the AI world:
| to hallucinate <=> to lie
| chankstein38 wrote:
| You're absolutely correct but it's fair to also point out
| that people do this constantly as well. Try googling any
| controversial topic.
| hbn wrote:
| People as a whole say a lot of things, correct and
| incorrect. But ChatGPT is a single thing that has a fairly
| impressive rate of reliability on information, but if you
| get into certain levels of details on certain topics, it'll
| just spit out false information that's indistinguishable
| from the correct stuff. I wouldn't expect a human to do
| that: trick me into thinking they're an expert with an
| encyclopedic, verifiably correct knowledge of a topic, but
| then confidently start lying about that same topic in that
| same conversation. It's much harder to vet, or know when
| you need to vet.
| kmlx wrote:
| > Sure ChatGPT can hallucinate but Google's results rely on
| some random person somewhere to have properly answered
| something.
|
| i don't know about your experience with chatgpt, but to me it's
| been untrustworthy. so much so that every answer i get needs to
| be double checked against google and that "random person".
| chankstein38 wrote:
| That's fair I can definitely agree that but my point was more
| that neither is a very trustworthy source anyway. It's the
| same way I'd double check one source versus another. It's
| just easier to start with GPT at this point because at least
| I know it'll just answer based on what it has been trained
| with versus special interests. One example I've used is the
| question "Is Fix A Flat ok to use in tires?" the results are
| from the company that makes fix a flat saying basically "Yes
| obviously" while you then see tire companies and repair shops
| giving you mixed responses. Then you have the third group
| being just people who have heard from one of the first 2
| groups. People are worried about AI degrading the quality of
| information over time, learning from itself. We're basically
| there thanks to people caring more about being right than
| being correct and never doing their own leg work.
| tadfisher wrote:
| I think Reddit has a golden opportunity here, considering how
| often I prefix searches with "site:reddit.com" to filter out
| SEO bullshit and usually get an answer from a subject-matter
| expert in the top ten results. They could even tie an LLM
| into it and regurgitate the highest-voted comment, and it
| would likely be more effective than Google or GPT.
| realusername wrote:
| I've been saying it for a while, you could basically
| replace entirely google with a 10k websites index and get
| above their quality of results 90% of the time.
|
| It's hard to explain how bad the quality dropped.
| notfed wrote:
| Stackexchange, yes
|
| But IME most reddit comments are the opposite of
| professional.
| rurp wrote:
| I find that forums are often some of the most useful results.
| The posts are typically written by genuine people, many of whom
| are passionate about the subject matter.
|
| Reliability can be an issue, but the medium at least provides a
| number of context clues to help. Seeing how individuals write
| and interact is helpful when judging how much weight to give to
| their words.
|
| Converting those forum posts into a generic and overly
| confident interface strips away useful information.
| kristopolous wrote:
| Google is optimized for shopping and commercial sites at all
| other costs.
|
| It's really become an impossibly frustrating tool. They've
| sucked for years and this was bound to happen.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Samsung has done this before, and Google has multiple times made
| various offers and incentives intended to "encourage" Samsung not
| to. Because a huge portion of the Android monopoly will leave
| Google Search when this happens. Stuff like OEMs getting a cut of
| Play Store revenue are mechanics done to avoid this.
|
| There's a pretty good chance Samsung is just negotiating for
| better terms, kinda like carriage disputes for TV networks.
| tazjin wrote:
| Yeah, for Google this is existential, for Microsoft it's not.
| Google will go a lot further than Microsoft will to keep
| Samsung on their side.
| rippercushions wrote:
| For comparison, Google pays Apple an estimated $15 billion a
| year to be the default engine on Safari.
|
| https://9to5mac.com/2021/08/25/analysts-google-to-pay-apple-...
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Indeed. Though for Android OEMs, "paying" for Google's app
| suite is considered part of the equation. It's less of an
| incentive for Samsung though since they have their own
| replacements for most Google apps ready to go.
| newbie578 wrote:
| Love to see a title like this. Would love to be a fly inside the
| Google execs offices right now. I do wonder if they are confused,
| why are their factory workers, i.e. leet code solvers not able to
| innovate?
|
| I find this hilarious and positively validating. Building a tech
| product is not about being able to memorise an algorithm or
| knowing how to sort an array in the fastest way possible. They
| are stuck in the past.
|
| You will not ask a today's Software Engineer how does a
| bootloader function, yet the big tech companies keep asking
| irrelevant questions blown by time and progress.
| dougmwne wrote:
| From my use of Bard, I think it's main issue is poor alignment
| due to lack of RLHF dataset. Open AI has been curating its data
| set for years as it aggressively pushed to productization. Google
| never cared about getting its models into the hands of the public
| so is having to scramble. I think Google will catch up
| eventually, but not before doing major damage to its market share
| and partnerships.
| roenxi wrote:
| 1) "It will reportedly be known as Project 'Magi' and is said to
| provide a far more personalized experience than the company's
| current service."
|
| That is super creepy. Google knows a lot about you, and now it is
| using that knowledge to really put you in a filter bubble.
| Imagine this plus engagement metrics.
|
| 2) So much for that monopoly a lot of people thought Google had.
| Turns out they're still as exposed to market pressure as they
| ever were.
| lightbendover wrote:
| The last thing anyone should ever want from a search engine is
| different results from the next person over.
| mattw2121 wrote:
| I strongly disagree. I would love for a search engine to,
| intelligently, cater the results based on my previous search
| history and patterns.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| I would love for that ability to be easily determined
| visually, and easily toggled on/off. A big "personalized"
| and "generic" toggle switch at the top would be useful.
| starkd wrote:
| I don't think the ability to serve up specialized content
| is the concern here. It is the fragmentation that results
| when we no longer have a shared reality or a consistent set
| of results in the population. Results specific to any one
| person is terrifying in some of its implications.
| maleldil wrote:
| That's how you create bubbles.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| part of the issue with 'bubbles', as I see it, is that
| you don't _know_ you 're in a bubble. a big huge honking
| option of "keep me in the bubble" and "show results
| outside my bubble" would make it a lot more obvious (and
| manageable) to many people who are oblivious to the
| notion that they live in an information bubble. won't
| stop people who only use one source of news, but in a
| search aspect, it would be useful.
| lightbendover wrote:
| Any time I use a Google product, I know I'm in a bubble.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Not all bubbles are harmful. I'm in a regional bubble
| when I search for "restaurant". I'm in a programming
| language bubble when I search for coding issues.
|
| Tune it to be less bubbly with controversial topics,
| perhaps.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| "Everyone should get the same search results." is really
| just rightspeak for "Everyone should be in my bubble."
| raldi wrote:
| What do you think an American tourist overseas wants when
| they ask for [football scores]?
|
| Do you think an ergonomics engineer logged in from the office
| and a musician in their studio might want different things
| when they search for [keyboard reviews]?
|
| How about a 16-year-old male native Texan versus a 62-year-
| old female immigrant with a degree in fine arts who search
| for [nearby movies]?
| fluidcruft wrote:
| I'm actually not entirely sure about that. For example, if I
| know a lot about a particular topic and the search engine
| knows that I know a lot about that particular topic, then
| when I search for something, it should give me a condensed
| result and not introductory-level material. Or if I have
| certain preferences for the format of material I'm given. For
| example, if I prefer college-level outline material versus
| eighth-grade reading level text, for example.
|
| So it seems entirely reasonable to me that you would get
| different results.
|
| If I had a personal assistant that was performing the search
| for me, I would expect customized results from them. I don't
| know why I should not expect the same from a machine.
| Arnt wrote:
| The next person over cares about sports and boobies. By which
| I mean spectator sports and, uhm, spectator boobies.
|
| Is the last thing I'd want _really_ results different from my
| neighbour?
| ant6n wrote:
| For the same query?
| websap wrote:
| Depends on the query. Fact based queries should have the
| same answer.
|
| If I'm searching for Python, I'd expect to see more about
| the programming language than the animal.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| > If I'm searching for Python, I'd expect to see more
| about the programming language than the animal.
|
| Which is different from what most people would expect.
| You see the problem.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Yes. I like that Google seems to surface programming
| results in the language I use. In the case of "boobies",
| if I'm a bird expert it might give me info on _blue
| footed_ boobies first.
| Arnt wrote:
| Query results are more diverse than you might expect. I
| once worked in a startup whose name we thought was
| unique, but in actual fact there were nine other
| similarly-named companies in the same city, not to
| mention names of non-local companies, organisations,
| products, objects...
| MajimasEyepatch wrote:
| That's not true. If I, a software developer, search for
| "pandas," Google should probably show me the Python data
| library near or at the top. If my friend who's not an
| engineer searches for "pandas," they're probably looking for
| the bear.
| dyno12345 wrote:
| this is might be a great example of the difference between
| what people think they want being completely at odds with how
| they actually behave
| SquareWheel wrote:
| That might be true in concept, but I don't think it's true in
| reality. When people search for something online, they want
| the first result to be whatever they had in mind. If I search
| for Python, I want the homepage for the programming language.
| When somebody else searches for Python, they might be looking
| to learn about the animal.
|
| You could argue that we should just ask for exactly what we
| want, but that puts more work on the user and reduces the
| effectiveness of the tool. I don't want to type more than
| "python", I just want the link!
|
| Search engines provide very little personalization even
| today. I'm almost surprised a competitor hasn't popped up
| with a product that tries to fill that niche.
| godshatter wrote:
| People are different, I get it, but I don't want a search
| engine that tries to second guess me all the time. If I'm a
| programmer and I'm interested in the actual animal, I don't
| want to have to fight against the product. I'd much rather
| use my knowledge to craft my queries intelligently so that
| I get exactly what I want.
|
| But then when it comes to technology, I'm a bit of a
| control freak.
| jfoster wrote:
| What you mean is that you don't want a search engine that
| guesses wrong.
|
| If you happen to get a search engine that is correctly
| giving you the right result every time because it happens
| to know what you want, I am guessing you will not have a
| problem with that.
| godshatter wrote:
| I would have a problem with that, because for a search
| engine to know me well enough to know what I actually
| want despite what I typed in it would have to know a lot
| of information about me I wouldn't trust the company
| behind it with.
|
| I spend most of my browsing time in a browser configured
| to clear cookies, cache, and history on exit.
|
| I'm not sure why most people are okay with companies
| gathering tons of data about them and trying to use it to
| manipulate them into buying products they don't actually
| want or need (among other uses), but I'm not one of them.
|
| Now if I could only get a search engine to not ignore
| query terms because it thinks it knows what I want better
| than I do, I'd be even happier.
| huimang wrote:
| "I'm not sure why most people are okay with companies
| gathering tons of data about them and trying to use it to
| manipulate them into buying products they don't actually
| want or need (among other uses), but I'm not one of
| them."
|
| It takes a ton of work to prevent it and it's more or
| less futile anyways. It's not so much that people are
| okay with this, rather it's a part of modern life and
| it's exhausting trying to mitigate it. And impulsively
| buying products due to ads is a personal failing.
| titzer wrote:
| Have you ever told someone to "just Google it?" Well,
| repeatable results are the underlying expectation broken
| by over-personalization.
| Agentlien wrote:
| Here's another example taken from my experience a few
| years ago. I once googled "pro tour results" and was, as
| expected, presented with an info box about the results of
| the recent Pro Tour in Magic: The Gathering.
|
| Some months later I was visiting family for a few weeks
| and wrote the same query on a family-member's PC. It gave
| me something about golf which I couldn't care less about.
| But I got the right results on my phone. I'm sure if I
| added "golf" to my query on the phone it would have given
| me info about that tournament instead. While it disturbs
| me how much I'm being tracked, I'm still happy with the
| practicality of the implied context being aligned with my
| interests.
| adfgadfhionio wrote:
| I can type at 100 words per minute. Typing "programming
| language" after every search will cost me maybe two seconds
| per search. The savings are trivial. The costs, however,
| are _not_ trivial. I have on several occasions spent half
| an hour trying to make a search engine handle a query that
| I _know_ worked in the past. And that 's when I find what
| I'm looking for at all. They have optimized the happy path
| but made failures worse and more frequent.
|
| What really bothers me is that no one _asked_ what I want.
| These companies replaced my tools behind my back. I have
| seen literal fistfights between machinists over people
| messing with their tools. This is at least that bad and
| probably worse. Software is central to how I make sense of
| the world. Software is not just part of my livelihood; it
| is how I make sense of the world. Changing my software
| behind my back is like "upgrading" my _eyes_ while I
| sleep. Why do we accept that such a central part of our
| world is completely out of our control?
| rurp wrote:
| Totally agree. I want to be surprised by a new UX in a
| software tool about as much as I want to be surprised by
| a new UX on my chainsaw. Nobody would put up with this in
| the physical world, I hate that it has become accepted in
| the software world.
|
| A lot of major UX changes have resulted in immense
| outrage, so it's not like everyone is fine with the
| churn. My best guesses on why it's accepted are:
|
| 1. Most big tech companies have monopoly power and get
| away with not caring much about their users. Maintenence
| work is famously under-rewarded at many companies,
| incentivizing changes even if they are net negative for
| users.
|
| 2. People get browbeaten about security concerns.
| Actually useful security updates often get bundled with
| UX changes.
| morkalork wrote:
| What about a child who used to be interested in reptiles
| but is now interested in programming? I get frustrated when
| Google starts acting "smart" and changing queries or hiding
| results. I've started to use Bing image search because I'd
| like more than 20 results, the way Google used to be. If
| they start acting like that even more, I'll use them even
| less!
| throwaway290 wrote:
| Google's model is the only viable one long term. With
| growing amount of information, the only way to find you
| something useful without making you enter a growing
| amount of terms is to maintain a context of what you are
| interested in.
|
| No child will be confused if they look up a programming
| language that they already know have the exact same name
| as reptile and get reptile first.
| latexr wrote:
| > Search engines provide very little personalization even
| today. I'm almost surprised a competitor hasn't popped up
| with a product that tries to fill that niche.
|
| Kagi seems to be that.
|
| https://kagi.com
| qwertox wrote:
| It really depends. If I want to search coding related stuff,
| I want this to be personalized as much as possible, with
| always having the option to extend the search for non-
| traditional topics.
|
| Or when searching for places to go, it would be nice to get
| recommendations which consider that I love to ride bicycle.
|
| Then there's DuckDuckGo on Firefox for legacy search if
| you're paranoid.
| HelloNurse wrote:
| Not "anyone": only mature searchers that worry about privacy,
| filter bubbles and artificially buried/censored good results.
|
| Advertisement buyers, on the other hand, benefit greatly from
| carefully controlling who sees their ads. For example, child
| care related products for female teenagers that are one year
| too old for their school class, or lawyers for young adult
| males from bad neighborhoods; I'm sure everyone can think of
| something more creepy and offensive.
| neffy wrote:
| For the unsuspecting computer nerd, a search for latex back
| at the dawn of search technology was briefly something that
| could truly open the unprepared mind to unsuspected vistas.
|
| Boy did that one get fixed fast.
|
| But let us spare a moment of thought for the subsequent
| searchers for interesting items of latex clothing, and how
| they felt about being exposed to interminable details about
| an obscure word processing system.
| overthrow wrote:
| I think the smarter move would be to integrate GPT-4 into Bixby.
| That's what finally got me to use Bing... it could probably get
| people to use Bixby too.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Bixby, the first key I disable, the first thing I adb uninstall
| on any samsung device.
|
| I cannot imagine every wanting to talk to any computing device.
| cleanchit wrote:
| all we need is a programmable voice assistant to which you
| can add custom voice commands that run your own programs.
| freediver wrote:
| Now we have Kagi and Magi, lovely.
|
| Btw Magi was already a search engine - magi.com and it seems it
| is suspending services now, wonder if domain is being bought by
| Google?
| kramerger wrote:
| Wait, people actually use the android search box?
|
| It's usually the first thing I remove
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| How do you search on your phone? Open the web browser, navigate
| to google.com and enter your query?
| surgical_fire wrote:
| Not GP, but I open the browser (in my case Vivaldi) and type
| my query in the address box.
|
| My default search engine on Vivaldi is DDG, it issues a query
| to DDG.
|
| Do you actually use the default google shit widget to do web
| searches?
| adithyassekhar wrote:
| Opening the widget is useless because it shows the result in
| the Google app (a 350MB monster) and when you click to open a
| result it opens in app.
|
| You can't have your browser's features, You can't open
| multiple results in multiple tabs you need to go back each
| time.
|
| A better option is to add the browser's search widget on the
| home screen, it takes you straight to the address bar where
| you can enter your query. All modern browsers support
| searching from the address bar, no need to go to google.com
| phpnode wrote:
| Normal people just use the defaults, the idea of choosing a web
| browser or changing the default search engine is completely
| alien to most.
| zirgs wrote:
| You can't even change the browser on iOS. Apple forces all
| browsers to use the same rendering engine under the hood.
| nailer wrote:
| Edit: looks like I'm wrong, see IceWreck's reply below.
|
| Original comment: my understanding is that this means Google will
| deny their customers access to Google Play, Photos and other
| first party Google apps. Samsung has replacements for some of
| these but not all of them.
| IceWreck wrote:
| Nope, to access play services you have to add the powered by
| android logo and preinstall a minimum set of required apps
| (including the google search app), but afaik nothing saying
| google has to be the default search engine.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Perhaps that will change in response to this.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| Seems unlikely. Samsung would justifiably paint that as
| anti-competitive / monopolistic and the last thing Google
| wants is more scrutiny from various government regulators
| right now.
| darkwater wrote:
| But that would be anti-competitive, right?
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I agree. Probably. Microsoft got hit for this, although
| of course changing browser is almost as easy as changing
| search engine.
|
| The question is: why isn't it anticompetitive to have
| Bing as the default?
| Zigurd wrote:
| Android's early commercialization actively encouraged OEMs to
| "customize" Android for at least two reasons: Android product
| maturity was questionable, and what else are phone OEM product
| managers going to do?
|
| Now that "Google experience" is generally cleaner and better
| than OEMs' customizations, Google is struggling to put the
| toothpaste back in the tube. It is very damaging to Android as
| a product because OEMs are slow to issue updates and won't
| continue updates beyond three years, in most cases.
|
| I doubt Google will strong-arm Samsung over this. They need
| Samsung more than Samsung needs the Play Store and other
| "Google experience" apps.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Pixels hardly get much more updates, despite Google.
| Zigurd wrote:
| That's one reason I like Pixels. The camera software is
| better than other phones, too. Unfucking a Samsung phone's
| default set of apps is annoying, though I admit I have not
| had to do that in a while.
| hn8305823 wrote:
| The inevitable result of years (decades?) of rest and vest
| Oras wrote:
| Looking at how Google managed to "launch" Bard, I do not see how
| they will convince Samsung from a tech perspective.
|
| Does anyone remember Bard? I hardly see anyone talking about it.
| tough wrote:
| I think Samsung will mostly care about money here
| spicyramen_ wrote:
| [dead]
| pelagicAustral wrote:
| I've been using Bing for a few weeks now it is not all the way
| there yet but so far the experience is more gratifying than
| Google. The results seem to be better and there is less ads on
| top the search results. Their AI integration is also well
| accomplished. No complains there...
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| I use bing via duck duck go and it's total dog shit but I don't
| want to use Google so I just suffer through it. And even
| Google's 1st page results are pretty useless nowadays
| moron4hire wrote:
| I've been using it for about 4 years now. Occasionally, I'll
| try Google when I'm having difficulty finding something with
| Bing. It's usually something where I have only a vague
| recollection of what I'm looking for and I'm starting by using
| search to find other keywords to eventually get to my true
| search terms. But it has yet to work out that Google has
| provided better results in those cases. Indeed, the results are
| often worse and I doubt I'd be able to make any progress with
| Google anymore.
|
| And now, with ChatGPT integrated with Bing, I have found it
| makes very, very short work of those sorts of vague, barely
| remembered searches.
| unloco wrote:
| except you cant use the AI function without using Edge.. That's
| a huge complaint from me.
| shostack wrote:
| Half the time I enter a prompt it spits back regular search
| results without any chat response.
| sempron64 wrote:
| Anecdotally, their actual search results have sucked for me.
| For example, I searched for "narrowest cars with 6 or more
| seats", and Bing's results were terrible and irrelevant. The AI
| version gave me some acceptable results but very few. Google
| returned pages of relevant results from different years.
| Sindisil wrote:
| When I try that search string on DuckDuckGo, I see what looks
| to be pretty decent results, FWIW.
| manquer wrote:
| DDG is backed by the bing index
| Sindisil wrote:
| Only partially.
|
| Also, even if it were just a Dr front for Bing, it
| doesn't change that I got perfectly reasonable results
| for the search string said to return unusable results
| from Bing, so
| Tactician_mark wrote:
| I'd use Bing's chat feature if it wasn't only available on
| Edge... I can't seem to get any Chromium browsers working well
| on my Fedora install. I already want to use Microsoft's search
| engine, why do they need me to use their browser too?
| seydor wrote:
| When MS switches on bing chat on chrome it will be a huge
| blow to google
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| Doubt it. Not enough people even know about it or will
| discover it to be a "huge blow" to google
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| There's a plugin for both chrome and firefox that allow chat
| to work within.
|
| They both work for me at least on MacOS and Windows; haven't
| tried any linux distos yet, but worth a look.
| badsoftware wrote:
| There's an extension that enables it for all browsers
| cosmojg wrote:
| There are addons/extensions for that!
|
| Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bing-
| chat-for...
|
| Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bing-chat-
| for-all-...
| ParetoOptimal wrote:
| Last I checked you can just use a user agent switcher
| plugin to say you're using bing FYI.
| hbn wrote:
| That's exactly what this is doing, but only on the
| bing.com domain
|
| https://github.com/anaclumos/bing-chat-for-all-
| browsers/blob...
| pelagicAustral wrote:
| Didn't realized that. My currently employer is MS-stack based
| so I have been working with Edge and to be fair, this was
| also surprising. I would probably rather work with Firefox
| but the browser is not that intrusive and provide the same
| level of support and tooling I get with FF. I think one the
| reasons I decided to stick with Edge these last few weeks is
| the extremely poor support I get when working with the
| SharePoint implementations that are for internal use, seems
| to be a issue with the way FF interacts with Windows
| Authentication.
| muxator wrote:
| Blind advice: it may be related to kerberos authentication.
| Firefox needs to whitelist the domains against which
| kerberos authentication can be performed.
|
| You may try configure network.negotiate-auth.trusted-uris
| and network.negotiate-auth.delegation-uris
| [deleted]
| andrewinardeer wrote:
| It's going to be wild when Bing Maps is superior to Google Maps.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Microsoft is a shark and they smell blood in the water right now.
| While I hate their products, I have to admire their decision
| making. For example, I think they see the threat that SteamDeck
| poses (Linux gaming becoming feasible) and are already working to
| head it off at the pass:
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/04/handheld-mode-for-wi...
| hbn wrote:
| I'm not sure that's a great example of quick-pivot defensive
| decision-making on Microsoft's part. It was just a leaked slide
| deck of a hackathon project done by a few employees. If the
| project actually gets greenlit and shipped, that's another
| thing.
| jzb wrote:
| Microsoft has often been good at the Vaporware / stall
| approach. If a competitor/underdog looks like they're getting
| traction, announce something similar even if it isn't
| available for a long time (or ever). If you can stall
| adoption for a few quarters you can catch up to or kill a
| competing product. Sigh.
| htag wrote:
| Microsoft has always been a shark in the water. Maybe it was
| slightly less capable of killing blows during the Ballmer days.
| devmor wrote:
| Both major search engines are utterly useless when compared to
| the Google of years ago, but anecdotally I do find Bing more
| reliable lately for actually finding what I'm looking for.
| HacklesRaised wrote:
| Out of the frying pan, into the fire!
| Rels wrote:
| A lot of words without a lot of source or data.
|
| The only source linked in the article:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/16/technology/google-search-...
|
| It's probably the only source at all, as every number in the
| sammobile article is also in the NYT, like the 160+ people
| working on Magi.
|
| As the sammobile article doesn't appear to do anything but
| regurgitate what is in the NYT article without any apparent
| validation on their side, the link should be changed to the NYT
| IMO, whose article seems at least based on actual internal
| messages from Google. I understand that the title isn't as
| attention grabbing though ("Google Devising Radical Search
| Changes to Beat Back A.I. Rivals").
| mannyv wrote:
| With AI search, you won't have to go to the referenced page to
| read the content, which will kill the display ad business.
|
| How's google going to get around that?
| ChatGTP wrote:
| Bing embeds ads, so no problem there.
| jzombie wrote:
| I can't tell if this Magi project is supposed to be an iteration
| of Bard or something new.
| eoooooooo wrote:
| Some interesting dynamics at play here if true. Google basically
| maintains Android to get people to use Google services on it, so
| Samsung switching to Bing would eliminate Google's incentive to
| develop Android. Samsung is also by FAR the largest Android OEM
| and holds almost as much power over the platform as Google just
| from the sheer amount of Android devices that they ship.
| amelius wrote:
| > Samsung switching to Bing would eliminate Google's incentive
| to develop Android
|
| They still have quite some apps on Android that they can use to
| extract data from users and send ads, e.g. youtube, gmail,
| maps, etc.
| Hippocrates wrote:
| Pretty interesting when put that way. Why DID google develop
| android??? Oh yeah.
| mrkramer wrote:
| Time to shower Samsung with cash.
| arthurofbabylon wrote:
| As an advertiser, it occurs to me that google severely dropped
| the ball. I've been waiting to hand them money, but they refuse
| to be sufficiently organized to onboard new, non-megacorp
| advertisers.
|
| At first glance that makes sense: prioritize onboarding large
| businesses with large budgets. With a second thought, this
| approach seems foolish: their ad network is an ecosystem, and the
| X00,000 businesses like mine that are excluded would be an
| enormous boost to ad bids, ad targeting, and ad quality - 3 of
| the 4 things that Google breathes (the fourth being traffic).
|
| If google screwed this up, what else are they screwing up?
| collaborative wrote:
| Don't hand them money. Ads only makes sense for companies with
| money to burn (mega corps)
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| How are people pronouncing "Magi"? Same as GIF?
| theonemind wrote:
| Do you mean are people going both ways? I don't think gif is
| settled. I'm in the soft G camp on gif.
|
| I think magi is already an English word with soft G, so I don't
| know if there's any room for controversy on this one.
| saulpw wrote:
| The gif debate is over, it's pronounced like gin or git.
| Animats wrote:
| This may be a Myspace moment for Google. The competition is now
| better.
|
| There's another huge issue. Google is an ad business. That meshes
| well with search, and not so well with question answering system
| on mobile. What's ChatGPT supposed to say? "But first, this word
| from our sponsor?".
|
| A big change in the ecosystem is coming. These next generation
| systems are being set up as walled gardens. Bing FAQ: "You'll
| need to use the Microsoft Edge browser and sign in with your
| Microsoft account to access all the capabilities of the new
| Bing." Google is talking about limiting the number of users of
| their chat system, which implies they are tying usage to login.
|
| This is a huge change to the business model. It's going to be
| about owning the customer relationship, not serving ads.
| luckydata wrote:
| Is it better? It's flashy and interesting, but I don't think
| ChatGPT brings any actual value to the search use case. Other
| stuff, sure.
| Animats wrote:
| It does on phones, where content has to be slimmed down.
| kazinator wrote:
| Could it be that Google is pissing off Samsung with their garbage
| Android releases whose most visible effect is that of actively
| ruining the user experience?
|
| I can imagine that creates work and headaches for Samsung, and
| other vendors.
| JohnFen wrote:
| It makes sense, though. Google search is terrible. Bing isn't
| great, either. But Bing probably charges less, and if there's no
| real quality difference between the two, why pay more?
| jsnell wrote:
| You've got the flow of money inverted... Phone manufacturers
| don't pay for the right of getting to set a search engine as
| the default. They expect to be paid.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Ah, right. My brain farted.
| jimmar wrote:
| This sounds similar to Walmart saying they'll stop taking Visa.
| Samsung would be dumb not to at least threaten moving away from
| Google, even if they had no intention to change. It's a
| negotiating tactic, one that has more teeth in recent months
| because Google's competitors are finally showing a real
| challenge.
| muyuu wrote:
| They'd only be moving away from Google search not GMS. In my
| recent experience, Google Search is mediocre at best and
| perhaps worse than Bing most of the time. So it's not a massive
| gamble.
| simula67 wrote:
| I always thought that Google made a big blunder by not
| encroaching upon Microsoft's turf more aggressively. They should
| have tried to make a better desktop OS (just buy Canonical or
| something) and then eat into Microsoft Office market share by
| releasing Google Office for Desktop. Wait for an opportunity to
| emerge and then pounce.
|
| This is precisely what Microsoft did to Google. They had Bing
| running in the background for years losing truckloads of money.
| Now that AI has upset the applecart, they can use Bing to choke
| off Google's airsupply.
|
| One of the reasons for Google getting so good early on was that
| they had oodles of usage data to test and improve their search
| functionality forming a positive feedback loop. Now, with deals
| such as this, Microsoft will have more data to tune their engine
| while Google is left on the sidelines.
|
| Let's just hope that the AI driven search revolution does not
| produce a monopoly.
| chickenpotpie wrote:
| ChromeOS and Google Docs?
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Is this really about AI and ChatGPT? Google search just sucks
| now. I actually get better results from Bing and Duck Duck Go.
|
| > then eat into Microsoft Office market share by releasing
| Google Office for Desktop
|
| With their inferior products? Not a chance. Google's apps are
| so far away from even competing with Microsoft's it's not even
| funny. Google Sheets doesn't even have proper tables. I
| wouldn't even be surprised if they cancelled it.
| Rastonbury wrote:
| The fact that big corps have moved to Gsuite always surprises
| me and credit to Google salespeople. But they will never
| meaningfully breach Office, people at Microsoft fight tooth
| and nail when renewals are up and Google is in the picture
| PlutoIsAPlanet wrote:
| > just buy Canonical or something
|
| Canonical doesn't really make any things that are considered
| part of a desktop OS. Ubuntu is just a package (and some argue
| a bad one) of things made by other people.
|
| There's very little value in the Linux desktop and I don't see
| that changing anytime soon. You're probably best re-inventing
| the wheel if you want a Windows competitor, like Google did
| with ChromeOS.
| murdoze wrote:
| I see no value in the Windows desktop. For my tasks.
| eastbound wrote:
| > There's very little value in the Linux desktop and I don't
| see that changing anytime soon
|
| Only because no-one has disrupted the market. Typical case of
| "Who would pay for a Mantis open-source bugtracker", then
| Jira appear and companies purchase it.
|
| What you mean is, who would pay for Ubuntu. But I'd pay for
| an open-source macOS, with online backups, video editing and
| SSO for my IT fleet, anything that doesn't look like Ubuntu.
| pjmlp wrote:
| They surely do, its reason to fame is being the best
| distribution supporting OEM devices without religion
| regarding open source drivers.
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| They're using a package manager that a lot of people are
| comfortable with, they give away their packages without
| subscriptions and they work with some OEMs.
|
| But in reality, the hardware support is in the kernel, so
| any distro with a more up2date kernel would fare at least
| as good. As for the software Canonical produces, I'm not
| great friends with anything. Snap is crap, Netplan is just
| a renderer to systemd-networkd or networkmanager, MAAS is a
| pile of garbage, Juju never caught on, upstart failed,
| Unity failed etc...
|
| We're running a lot of Canonical at work and I'm not
| particularly impressed.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Nope in what concerns proprietary drivers and FOSS drama.
|
| There is a reason why Canonical was the first option when
| Microsoft introduced WSL.
| asddubs wrote:
| A canonical engineer did fix a kernel bug that prevented my
| laptop from booting on newer kernel versions. And they do
| develop their own software, too. Saying that they are "just a
| package" is not giving them enough credit.
| sho_hn wrote:
| > There's very little value in the Linux desktop
|
| There's a tremendous amount of _value_ in the Linux desktop.
| It 's used to do amazing things every day.
|
| What you mean is that it's very hard to turn it into a
| business model, which I'd agree with. But these are not the
| same in the world.
| eldaisfish wrote:
| To you and me, sure, there is value in a linux desktop.
|
| To the average user, linux is not in any state to be a
| useable, daily driver desktop. Where it works, it is the
| exception, not the norm.
|
| Taking linux and turning it into a business model can be
| done - see valve and the steam deck. Granted, that is
| gaming-only but it can be done. The #1 problem with the
| linux desktop is that there is no single linux desktop and
| things break far too often.
| sho_hn wrote:
| > To you and me, sure, there is value in a linux desktop.
|
| "You and me" is actually not a small or meaningless
| demographic. It includes my thousands of colleagues at
| Mercedes-Benz who use Linux desktops to do engineering
| work, and millions of other developers. It means a lot of
| scientists, for example at NASA and CERN. It means a lot
| of school students and government employees in
| educational and other municipal deployments.
|
| A lot of the places where Linux is used is for roles that
| act as multiplicators, e.g. in the development and
| production of end-user products, or research/science/RD
| that will lead to new ones, or in educating the people
| who will one day make new ones.
|
| All of this is a lot of value if you sum it up. There may
| be no single shining CEO and his shareholders getting
| rich off of the Linux desktop in the way we're used to
| fawning over in the tech hustle news cycle. But the world
| at large almost certainly is. I submit that's a fine
| success metric.
|
| > To the average user, linux is not in any state to be a
| useable, daily driver desktop.
|
| For many users it's today _more_ reliable than
| contemporary Windows. Ten years ago, the Linux desktop
| experience for a non-technical user was death by a
| thousand papercuts. Today there are still some gaps in HW
| support that can create unsolvables, but if your machine
| is well-supported, things work just fine.
|
| What's mainly keeping it back is many other factors, from
| channel availability to software availability.
|
| > see valve and the steam deck
|
| :-) I worked on the Steam Deck as CTO of one of Valve's
| contractors on the project. Glad you like it.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| > -) I worked on the Steam Deck as CTO of one of Valve's
| contractors on the project. Glad you like it.
|
| Not who you're responding to, but I am extremely grateful
| for the work that was put to make gaming on Linux
| possible.
|
| I may not own a Steam Deck, but it's development allowed
| me to switch entirely to Linux without looking back.
| philistine wrote:
| In 2023, Linux on the desktop is merely death by a
| hundred papercuts instead of a thousand. Progress!
| surgical_fire wrote:
| You may be snarky, but it is actually meaningful
| progress.
|
| My first attempt on Linux was 20 years ago, before I was
| a technical user. It was a nightmare. Getting my mouse to
| work was impossible. Even figuring out how to turn the
| computer off so I could reinstall Windows was a pain.
|
| I came back to Linux some 8 years ago, already as a
| Developer. Installed Ubuntu. Everything hardware worked
| well, no need to tinker around. Usability was good and
| somewhat intuitive, but it took me some time to adjust. I
| enjoyed it for programming, but not being able to play
| most games I care about limited my use, and I kept
| Windows in dual boot.
|
| Nowadays I use Linux Mint as my only OS. It's objectively
| better than Windows in every way. For regular usage I
| don't even need to tinker with anything. Although I like
| the terminal and prefer using it, I can totally see how
| an average user can get by without touching it at all. I
| need only to tinker a little to get certain games
| running, and that's all.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > To the average user, linux is not in any state to be a
| useable, daily driver desktop.
|
| I've switched about a dozen average users to Linux from
| Windows, and they have all been happy with the change and
| have not switched back.
|
| Based on that, I say that Linux absolutely is usable as a
| daily driver desktop. The only place I can see where
| Linux might not be the right choice is with a certain
| class of gamer -- but those gamers are not "average
| users".
|
| > The #1 problem with the linux desktop is that there is
| no single linux desktop
|
| That's a strength, not a weakness. For the user want a
| windows-like desktop? Done. Does the user want something
| more to their style of working? Done. Not being locked
| into the desktop means that if your objection to desktop
| linux is the UX, there's probably a different desktop
| that will make you happier.
| jabradoodle wrote:
| If it takes someone to show you how, it is not there yet.
| I know many technical people who can't be bothered to
| deal with Linux on the desktop due to driver issues et al
|
| For it to be ready to be a mainstream desktop, it needs
| to just work.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > If it takes someone to show you how, it is not there
| yet
|
| Installing Windows is a more complicated and confusing
| job than installing Linux. The people who have to be
| shown how to install Linux also have to be shown how to
| install Windows.
|
| The fact is that I don't really show them how to install
| and configure this stuff -- it's really very easy. What I
| do is hold their hand to get them past the fear of the
| unknown.
| sho_hn wrote:
| > If it takes someone to show you how, it is not there
| yet.
|
| How many average users install Windows by themselves?
| Most people just take their Windows laptop to a
| store/service provider for maintenance, buy a new PC
| because "the old one is slow now" or have their nerdy fam
| member once a year remove mal/spy/adware and run a reg
| cleaner. And yes, show them things.
|
| Like OP, I've converted many family members over the
| years to Linux desktops, and as the resident nerdy family
| member, the amount of maintenance and assistance I need
| to provide has gone down very decently vs. supporting
| family Windows sytems.
|
| My 70+ mother in law has no problems using a Linux
| desktop to run her book club and other things she needs
| to do, but is far less likely to accidentally install
| malware. I used to come back to these systems a year
| later and find a system tray full of 20 new icons, a
| stack of 5 new browser toolbars, ad popups and "install
| new version" popups galore and other horrific stuff that
| needed hours to clean up or required a wipe and
| reinstall.
|
| There's a lot of Windows users on the fence about Linux
| that absolutely underestimate how technical they are and
| how much active and passive maintenance they do on their
| Windows systems. Are you a tech user who reads The Verge
| or Ars Technica and knows in advance about that bad new
| option in the new Win11 update that you will switch of
| day 0? Do you have your mental laundry list of five
| settings you change in every new Windows system you
| acquire? Most Windows users are and do not.
|
| The truth is, a lot of people have a working body of
| knowledge about how to admin and keep alive a Windows
| system, and a Linux switch requires re-learning and re-
| acquiring similar knowledge at times. And it's absolutely
| fine if you don't have the time to do that. There's value
| to that existing body of knowledge, and there is a
| switching cost. Some people have better things to do than
| installing Linux. But Windows is not magically
| maintenance/upkeep/difficulty-free.
| Xelbair wrote:
| >google
|
| >making any product that lasts
|
| that's a tough chance for OS.
|
| it wouldn't hit growth targets after n-th year and would be
| remotely disabled by google worldwide.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _...Google Office for Desktop_
|
| They did one better and made Chrome _so good_ that its the OS
| for most, for all intents and purposes, now.
| garganzol wrote:
| > better desktop OS
|
| > Google
|
| It wouldn't be an OS, it would be a casino full of flashy ads.
| The worst company for anything business critical. Ads - yes,
| email - ok, anything else - never. They get away with Android
| because it's mostly a consumer market.
| indymike wrote:
| Having deployed Chromebooks into corporate and education,
| there's less ad content there than on a Windows machine... by
| oodles. In fact, the only place a stock Chromebook has ads is
| on websites, in the browser and I believe on a personal
| install it tries to sell you a subscription to Google's cloud
| service for extra storage. Once you start installing apps,
| well, your mileage will vary.
|
| Having used Android as my daily driver since Android 1.3,
| again, the default experience is pretty much ad-free. I've
| even used Android in "desktop mode" where you connect a
| display, keyboard and mouse and used windowed Android apps.
| When you start installing apps, or if you buy a device with
| non-default apps installed (i.e. the mobile carrier install
| as infested crap). In that case you can disable or uninstall
| that app and move on.
|
| > The worst company for anything business critical. Ads -
| yes, email - ok, anything else - never.
|
| While Google does have a history of cancelling some well-
| loved products (like Reader), Google Apps (Word Processing,
| Spreadsheet, Presentations, etc...) has been solid for a
| decade. The live, multiuser, real-time editing and versioning
| is a wonderful feature for collaboration. Also, Google has
| been very reasonable on pricing, and after six years of
| running three companies on Google Worplace/Apps, I'm very
| impressed with the reliability of Google Workplace (what they
| are now calling Apps).
| CydeWeys wrote:
| Have you actually used Chrome OS? It's not like this at all.
| I would imagine the same approach would be taken on a fully
| featured OS.
|
| Ironically Windows is the OS that is full of shit ads these
| days, not Google's OS.
| rob74 wrote:
| Did you use Windows recently?
| https://uk.pcmag.com/migrated-3765-windows-10/132748/how-
| to-...
| dboreham wrote:
| Was about to post the same thing. Windows is infuriating
| for me not because I dislike ads per se, but it triggers
| all sorts of ADD behavior in my brain -- try to open an
| application, and "ohh, what's Tom Cruise up to today?!".
| colanderman wrote:
| Windows is already crapped up with flashy ads; it's a pretty
| damn low bar.
| Zigurd wrote:
| Desktop market share moves very slowly. A 1% shift per year is
| a big move last I looked. ChromeOS is doing about as well as
| possible gaining share.
| unloco wrote:
| ChromeOS is only in the market because they have cheap
| laptops that schools bought up. And not a single student I
| know would ever use one outside of school.
| gehwartzen wrote:
| Which is kind of depressing. I get public schools have
| budgetary needs and I suppose Chromebooks are perfectly
| appropriate for Elementary and (maybe) Middle Schoolers (my
| kid has one, he's in 2nd grade and its fine) but they
| should really consider supplying real laptops to the High
| Schoolers so they learn on hardware and software used in
| the real world.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| cornering the market on educational computers is nothing to
| sneeze at.
| Zigurd wrote:
| Also "worst gaming device" is a feature, not a bug in
| that market.
| the_snooze wrote:
| >Google Office for Desktop. Wait for an opportunity to emerge
| and then pounce.
|
| Microsoft Office has a lot of network effect surrounding it.
| Organizations use MS Office because the people who pay them
| (e.g., government or large corporations) use MS Office. I've
| tried switching away to LibreOffice or Google
| Docs/Sheets/Slides, and those are very likely to mangle layout
| and formatting when saving to DOCX/XLSX/PPTX. Not worth the
| hassle trying to troubleshoot why my government program
| managers aren't seeing what I'm seeing on the document I sent
| them.
| bachmeier wrote:
| > Now that AI has upset the applecart, they can use Bing to
| choke off Google's airsupply.
|
| It's more like Google has to change from optimizing for next
| week's revenue numbers to optimizing for user experience.
| People have been saying for years that their search results are
| trash. That we haven't seen a response from Google may be an
| indicator that they aren't able to return useful search
| results.
| ChildOfChaos wrote:
| 'People have been saying for years that their search results
| are trash'.
|
| Have they? I hear people say this on Hacker news but i've
| never heard it anywhere else, people seem to be using the
| internet just fine with Google as there main search engine,
| what is the alternative? Bing? It's still trash and Bing Chat
| is like a worse version of ChatGPT, I don't see it replacing
| Google currently.
| rurp wrote:
| FWIW, many of the non-tech people I know gripe about the
| same user facing issues that come up on HN, including poor
| Google search results. They just don't post about it on the
| internet and might not even know that there are
| alternatives.
|
| I would bet that a good chunk of users don't know that you
| can change the default browser or search engine, or at
| least don't think to do so. They might not like the UX, but
| they have other things occupying their focus and muddle
| through a bad experience with their phone or PC, just like
| they do with many other mediocre interfaces throughout the
| week.
| pteraspidomorph wrote:
| Bing Chat was better but after three months of very hard
| work Microsoft successfully managed to remove all the good
| parts.
| gaogao wrote:
| Where do you see ChromeOS and Google Office as falling flat in
| that regard? Desktops are pretty smaller in market size
| compared to laptops these days.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| For a business environment, Google Office is terrible
| compared to MS Office.
|
| The features and functionally of Google office are very
| limited, especially when you compare Sheets to Excel
| MegaDeKay wrote:
| Or <null> to Visio. Visio is huge where I work. Being able
| to cut and paste technical diagrams into complex Word
| documents is a really important for our uses.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| I have replaced visio with drawing.net for 90% of use
| cases
| no_wizard wrote:
| This is the only part they aren't on caliber in most cases.
| I rarely hear Slides or Docs isn't as good as PowerPoint or
| Word (even though, at least on paper, Word and Powerpoint
| have more features).
|
| It seems that the sticky moat is Excel (and to a lesser
| extent but gaining somewhat rapidly, the Teams integration
| into 365. Google has blown it on being _the_ enterprise
| chat solution).
|
| Seems Google could chase this to close this, but Microsoft
| Excel is just absolutely sticky
| hcurtiss wrote:
| Word is too, at least for lawyers. A whole generation of
| lawyers has spent 20 years learning the intricacies of
| cross-references, page/section numbering, styles and
| formatting. While some of that is possible in Google
| Docs, it's clumsy and uses much different conventions.
| no_wizard wrote:
| Just to clarify, I do know that Word fills some niches
| better (through both feature set and inertia). I know
| there are universities that still send their post doc
| writing standards out as word templates and they don't
| always translate well to Google Docs either.
|
| That said, I think Excel is the exponentially higher case
| and hardest to replace. The niches filled by Word that
| Google Docs can't fill readily are pretty small
| comparatively. Excel has grown to mean so much more than
| just spreadsheets. Its pretty much a first line database
| to a huge amount of the business community, and still
| relied on across entire industries to do work, from
| wealth management to accounting to payroll to inventory
| etc.
|
| I have, upon thinking about it as well, to hear any
| raised point about PowerPoint vs Google Slides where
| PowerPoint does something so niche that Slides doesn't
| and its a deal breaker, actually.
| ant6n wrote:
| Desktop = Laptop
| shadowgovt wrote:
| God, I wish that were true.
|
| Ask me how many times I've effed up the battery and sleep
| configuration upgrading Linux on a desktop vs a laptop.
|
| Relative to desktops, laptops tend to be quirky little
| things because the heavy constraints of form factor, power,
| and weight result in engineering trade-offs and outright
| hacks that aren't necessary in the desktop ecosystem.
| KyeRussell wrote:
| Okay. You've immediately alienated all but the smallest
| minority of users to draw a distinction that most people
| just flat out don't experience.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| It's not invalid though. Those are the reasons I stopped
| trying to use Linux on a laptop.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Linux is not relevant to the discussion.
| DrThunder wrote:
| By desktop app they don't mean an app that runs on desktop
| computers only. They mean an app that runs locally and not
| web-based. Office 365 desktop vs Office 365 web portal.
| Google doesn't offer anything but web based.
| judge2020 wrote:
| I'm not sure that would have changed anything, though.
| Their main loss is that ChromeOS isn't marketed as
| 'business-oriented' but that's probably because you can't
| market it to businesses when tons of legacy software
| doesn't run, and accountants still tend to prefer Excel
| over sheets (in my experience). But when businesses do use
| GWorkspace products, it's not an issue that it all happens
| within the browser.
| DrThunder wrote:
| You haven't been in a business environment then. Almost
| all of the users whine about having to use Google's Web
| Apps and prefer the desktop version of 365. Microsoft
| absolutely dominates in the enterprise environment. We
| have both, just because department will not use the
| Google Apps. They'll accept Gmail but that's it.
| KyeRussell wrote:
| You are misattributing the cause. It's not because
| they're web-based, it's because they aren't *really^
| Word, Excel, etc. I've shot myself in the foot one too
| many times with the web-based Office suite. There's a
| reason there's a nice big button to bounce you to the
| desktop applications - for when you need to do something
| they didn't bother putting in the web version.
| DrThunder wrote:
| Eh... I think it's both. A lot of end-users don't
| understand understand what a web browser is. The older
| crowd is completely weirded out about running an app in
| their browser.
| judge2020 wrote:
| It could just be my circle of influence which is mostly
| SWEs, but nobody complains about Google and most prefer
| it. Maybe it's because doing anything on the web version
| of M365 is hell on earth if you have the audacity to be
| signed into more than one account at once.
| scarface74 wrote:
| You think the chief users of Office apps are software
| developers?
| DrThunder wrote:
| I don't think software developers are a good measure.
| They're not heavy users of any sort of word processing.
| amaccuish wrote:
| And as an an Admin, GMail is awful. Microsoft knows what
| admins need and give them to tools to do it. There is so
| much that can't be configured with GMail, and they don't
| even provide a proper cmd tool like Microsoft does with
| their powershell modules. The only option is "GAM", a
| third party not supported by Google project [0].
|
| Another example, the default routing rules page in the
| admin console defaults to only showing 10 rules. Every
| time you add a rule, the pagination is reset, so you get
| lost where you are and can't even see the rule you
| literally just added.
|
| And as an identity platform, Google is nothing compared
| to Okta or AAD. Whilst it's wonderful that Google login
| is everywhere now, I can't for example, request the user
| do 2FA for particular apps.
|
| Even the admin console only requires 2FA once a month,
| it's ridiculous.
|
| And don't get me started on "groups" still being attached
| to distribution lists out of the 60s [1]. Or the
| inability to have shared mailboxes.
|
| No one should ever choose Google Workspace over Office
| 365.
|
| [0] https://support.google.com/a/answer/10014088?hl=en
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35070618
| DrThunder wrote:
| Yeah I agree. You shouldn't have to use 3rd party tools
| to administer Google Workspaces. I find myself using
| Advanced-GAM and BetterCloud far too often.
|
| I'm trying to talk my boss into dumping Gmail and
| switching to Outlook. It's such a waste running 365 and
| Google.
|
| I've specifically been using Azure as my "source of
| truth" because I think it's more likely we'll dump Google
| than we'll ever dump things like on-prem AD or Azure.
| delfinom wrote:
| >and accountants still tend to prefer Excel over sheets
| (in my experience).
|
| And it isn't because they didn't try Sheets. Lol. Nobody
| I know likes Google Sheets.
|
| They basically copied the UX of Office 2003 and did
| nothing to improve upon it since it's initial release
| over a decade ago.
|
| It's awful.
|
| Shit, it still doesn't have the concept of tables like
| Excel does and you need to manually paint rows, manually
| find the hidden filter creation option for cells and
| manually refresh the table because the fitlers are
| kludged such that they don't automatically re-filter when
| you edit a row.
|
| Even Mail Merging is awful.
| https://developers.google.com/apps-
| script/samples/automation...
|
| Like, you don't need a programming degree to mail merge
| in Office but you do for Google Sheets because it's a
| script instead of built-in feature.
| murdoze wrote:
| I love Google Docs and Sheets and hate Word and Excel.
| DrThunder wrote:
| You're probably in the tech field so you're not a good
| measure of the average white collar office worker.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Laptops are desktops.
|
| In regards to ChromeOS, it hardly matters outside the US
| school system and Googleplex.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| For me, one of the things that has stopped me from even
| trying ChromeOS is that is/meant to be 100% cloud which
| means no local storage and since I code for a living having
| things locally is a must for me.
|
| It makes 100% sense in Schools and other places where you
| want to be able to reset the OS constantly and stop people
| from breaking it. I think for facebook machine's it would
| do well too but again I think alot of people will want to
| have local storage.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Chrome OS deals decently with local file. This is the
| same way Chrome deals with local stuff anywhere else.
|
| I think people underestimate what ChromeOS can do by a
| lot. There's the android subsytem coming with it, along
| with an optional linux subsystem, so all in all it covers
| a lot of ground.
|
| That said, it's still limited a lot by Google not going
| the full length and having half baked support for a lot
| of things. Access to the bluetooth stack is pretty random
| for android apps for instance. Then Chromebooks are
| mostly low power machines, so the linux substack only
| helps that much.
|
| Tablet mode support is too weak to take full advantage of
| the different form factors. ChromeOS isn't configurable
| enough to alternative keyboard configs, system wide
| shortcuts etc.
|
| All in all, it has so much promises, only half delivered.
| But the half we have now is still pretty decent IMHO.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >I think people underestimate what ChromeOS can do by a
| lot. There's the android subsytem coming with it, along
| with an optional linux subsystem, so all in all it covers
| a lot of ground.
|
| First impressions are everything.
|
| ChromeOS's first impression was that it's Chrome in OS
| form with no local compute whatsoever; everything is done
| via the internet, aka the cloud.
|
| That is not strictly the case anymore, but changing first
| impressions simply is not trivial.
|
| Higher end Chromebooks also rival low- to middle-tier
| Windows laptops in price, and if you're paying top dollar
| why not buy the latter and have access to the much more
| capable Windows ecosystem instead?
| pjmlp wrote:
| Android and Crostini are only on some flagship devices.
|
| And even in those, the lilliput SSD sizes make them
| hardly workable versus w regular laptop for the same
| price range.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| On the SSD size, it's often the RAM that's really
| limiting for the linux subsystem. It's the same issue as
| on cheap windows laptops, only a tad better as ChromeOS
| is more frugal and orchestrates resources more
| aggressively.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Most cheap Windows devices come with 512GB.
|
| Chrome being frugal, that is interesting. Maybe Electron
| devs could take some tips from ChromeOS.
| jamespo wrote:
| That's not accurate, my device a Lenovo Chromebook S345
| supports linux containers & android apps and is
| absolutely not a flagship. You'd struggle to run windows
| on a similarly priced laptop (cost me PS150 a year ago).
| pjmlp wrote:
| It definitely is for the random devices being sold on
| German stores, usually with repeated discounts until
| finally someone takes them away.
|
| Most of the time it is not possible to enable it.
| darrenf wrote:
| > For me, one of the things that has stopped me from even
| trying ChromeOS is that is/meant to be 100% cloud which
| means no local storage
|
| I've had a Pixelbook for 4.5 years -- a Google product,
| so arguably as it's "meant to be" -- and it has 128GB of
| local storage, and I believe you can get them with up to
| 512GB. Coding locally using Linux VMs/containers is
| actually pretty pleasant IME (albeit I don't do frontend
| work).
| CydeWeys wrote:
| Chrome OS devices have local storage. Premium ones (which
| are not even that expensive, in the $500+ price tier)
| have a 256GB SSD for local storage. This at least has not
| been my issue with Chrome OS.
| pjmlp wrote:
| For that price I rather pay for a proper OS, with at
| least a 512SSD and hardware not constrained to Web API
| capabilities.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| Google docs/etc are totally eating into Microsoft Office's
| market share. I can't remember the last company I was at
| where they expected us to use Microsoft office products. But
| we used Google docs,sheets,etc constantly.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| For big corporates, it is still 100% Microsoft Office and
| 0% Google Workspace. Email is still 100% Microsoft
| Outlook/Exchange. That said, for small to medium, Google
| _must_ be eating into MSFT, but I don 't have any
| visibility.
| thisisnico wrote:
| As someone that works at an IT company, not a software
| company, Almost every customer that started with google is
| switching to o365. Nearly 99% of our clients are on o365 or
| are switching from on-prem exchange to o365. I can see
| maybe the bubble of silicon valley might be more oriented
| toward google, but the vast majority of businesses continue
| to migrate to o365.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| O365 is really starting to get tons of traction even with
| the mid-sized companies.
| bflesch wrote:
| M365 the far superior solution to many business problems.
| As a long-time paying gmail customer I'm also moving
| away. It looks like Google didn't improve UI in their
| admin menus for at least a decade.
| bink wrote:
| Some people would pay extra to not have the UI change
| every couple of years. As someone who no longer regularly
| uses Windows it drives me nuts to try to find anything in
| their web apps or settings interfaces.
| jonhohle wrote:
| Do you prefer it, or is it simply a cost saving measure?
| GSuite is substandard even compared to Open Office.
|
| The only benefit, and it may be a big one, is real time
| collaboration and document sharing.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| O365 has the same real time collaboration and document
| sharing. I worked at one company they were originally on
| Google had to share the enterprise plan by the parent
| company for "money reasons". People just kept using
| Google until the account was closed 12 months after
| migrating. When I left they were going back to Google.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| My current employer is pushing us to Office 365. We have
| a lot of meetings that center around a shared document.
| The syncing in Word is extremely slow and in Excel we
| gave up on it entirely because we got constant merge
| conflicts with no clear way off fixing them. Outlook web
| is very slow and sometimes stopped fetching new emails
| till you reload. Meanwhile outlook for Mac silently
| doesn't show more than ten all-day events which lead to
| massive confusion during the holidays with our shared OoO
| calendar.
|
| I understand that some might see offline storage and
| editing as advantages, but I've only seen it create
| chaos. It makes the file save dialog much more complex
| and I constantly have non-technical users mail files
| around like it's the 90s because they don't understand
| how to share it properly.
| scarface74 wrote:
| It's really not that hard to find data on GSuite vs Office
| market share that isn't anecdotal
|
| https://www.saasgenius.com/blog/why-office-365-is-
| overtaking...
| ryanwaggoner wrote:
| The only "data" I see there is a couple survey results
| from 2016.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Major enterprises are not going to GSuite.
|
| https://www.computerworld.com/article/3637079/as-google-
| move...
|
| > Google grew its share of the productivity software
| market to 10.3% in 2020, according to research from
| Gartner, taking about 2% from Microsoft. Microsoft is
| still the clear leader however, with 89.2%. Overall, the
| productivity software suite market grew 18.2% during
| 2020.
| ryanwaggoner wrote:
| My point wasn't about the market share, it was that you
| decided to be condescending about not having relevant
| data, and then you also failed to provide any :)
| rchaud wrote:
| A Google desktop OS wasn't going to win against Windows in PC
| gaming compatibility. Nor was it going to displace MS Office +
| Active Directory at the enterprise level.
|
| With ChromeOS, they took the route available to them, which was
| to enter the school market and try to build something from
| there.
| Macha wrote:
| What would a Google office for desktop do that the current
| Google docs doesn't?
|
| Even MS is moving office to being cloud based, so it's not
| clear business users value local document availability that
| much - rather the opposite, I've worked in places that like
| cloud services because locking out their data from a
| disgruntled or departed employee is one button away.
| layer8 wrote:
| There are worlds of difference between MS Office and Google
| Docs in terms of features and abilities. There's actually a
| risk for MS to lose their edge by moving to the cloud with a
| reduced feature set.
| Macha wrote:
| Would Google Docs have more features if they had to
| maintain more platforms? I'd expect the opposite.
| pibechorro wrote:
| We will only see a monopoly if there is protectionism.
| Regulations, licensing, do not compete patents, etc.
| traveler01 wrote:
| Google constant failure astonish me. How a company with so much
| money, so many wonderful engineers can't produce a source of
| income other than the search engine? I kept reading news about
| Google's AI programs, how the hell was Microsoft with OpenAI
| that came up with the biggest hit in AI?
|
| Also, how does Google want people to use their new services if
| they keep closing them down after their "failure" (a.k.a Google
| completely forgeting about them and proceeding to close them
| down).
| Gustomaximus wrote:
| > so many wonderful engineers can't produce a source of
| income other than the search engine?
|
| I get the essence of the comment and agree somewhat, but also
| feel;
|
| There are plenty of other areas driving big revenue like
| adsense, youtube, play store, cloud and pixel.
|
| I dont feel its fair to compare revenue to these in the same
| level of search. Search was a true unicorn business and took
| over the world, there only so many businesses that will ever
| reach those heights. If any of these businesses were stand
| alone they would be impressive. Its like looking at that
| photo of Arnold Schwarzenegger standing next to Andre the
| Giant, Arnie is a big guy, but there he doesn't look too
| significant.
|
| I think, the bigger worry is their chrun and burn is going to
| limit take-up of future products. They need to do something
| like run new products in a lab type environment, not put the
| full weight of the weight of the brand behind them til they
| earn reasonable thresholds, then make them so they can be
| split out if teams want to take them independent should they
| decide to close.
| scarface74 wrote:
| > There are plenty of other areas driving big revenue like
| adsense, youtube, play store, cloud and pixel.
|
| YouTube is still estimated to be barely above break even,
| GCP is losing money and if you look at the estimated Pixel
| sells annually of around 5 million a year is about how many
| iPhones Apple sells in three weeks.
| jwestbury wrote:
| Taking another approach: Google is proof that having great
| engineering doesn't matter without competent business
| leadership. For all their failures, this is where Amazon
| and Microsoft excel -- they both have incredibly talented
| businesspeople with long-term focus and a focus on
| delivering real value, rather than pursuing the latest fad
| passion project.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| > For all their failures, this is where Amazon and
| Microsoft excel
|
| Amazon isn't doing all that well recently, though (check
| $AMZN). And I'd argue that the product design on their
| biggest product, the e-commerce bit, is terrible. I know
| so many people, me included, who no longer buy entire
| categories of goods on Amazon because you simply can't
| trust the quality/authenticity of the goods anymore.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| Amazon's biggest money maker is AWS, so even if the
| storefront is slowing down in growth they're still doing
| fine.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| They're not doing fine as evidenced by the loss of value
| in their share price. AWS on its own isn't big enough,
| nor still growing enough, to justify a massive valuation
| anymore. And the web storefront is suffering too. Amazon
| simply isn't doing that well at the moment any way you
| look at it.
| yunwal wrote:
| AWS's market position is deteriorating rapidly. They're
| now at just over 30% of market share compared to 50% in
| 2018. Meanwhile the trend right now is big companies
| pulling their core infra out of the cloud and into their
| own datacenters. They also haven't managed to launch a
| game-changing best-in-class service or feature in 5 years
| outside of maybe custom lambda runtimes.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if this AI wave pushes azure into
| the forefront.
| [deleted]
| pinewurst wrote:
| Don't forget also Google's consistent bad treatment of
| customers (or rather victims as it often feels like)
| across all their businesses.
| Phelinofist wrote:
| Not trying to be snarky, but what good business has MS
| done recently? Windows 11 is a shit show, ads in the
| start menu, milking Office and SQL, OpenAI is just an
| investment.
|
| I don't follow that closely so I might have missed
| something.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| I think it all comes down to the culture of rewarding
| shipping new things, but not maintaining and iterating. If
| Microsoft was like Google they would have shut down Bing
| years ago.
| DrBenCarson wrote:
| Their search engine doesn't make money. Ads do.
| regnull wrote:
| Management. The a company grows, top management becomes risk-
| averse, and middle management cares more about their carriers
| than the company future. They will kill anything perceived as
| even slightly risky coming out of engineering. And guess
| what, anything good and new will be controversial and risky.
| jmyeet wrote:
| It's incredibly rare for any company to produce one golden
| goose. It's even rarer for them to produce more than one.
| Google is the norm here.
|
| Chrome and Gmail are homegrown but Maps, Youtube, Docs/Drive,
| the display ad business (ie DoubleClick) and Android are all
| acquisitions.
|
| Think of it this way: if your ad business generates
| $100B/year, how do you justify spending _billions_ on
| something that will generate a farction of that, particularly
| to start? How does that effort ever compete for resources
| internally?
|
| And if you are successful it reaches a point where your two
| efforts can become competing interests.
| bdavisx wrote:
| What makes them "wonderful engineers"? The vast majority are
| very smart, and obviously can code 'leet code like no
| tomorrow, but that doesn't make them wonderful.
|
| Remember when the person who created homebrew couldn't get a
| job at google. That person created software used by a lot of
| people. He saw something that "needed fixing" and he fixed
| it. He fixed it so well a bunch of other people started using
| his fix. That's a wonderful engineer. Created a project used
| (and loved?) by many people. That's the kind of person you
| want helping to create products at your company.
|
| Google puts so much emphasis on (coding) skills that aren't
| needed for the majority of the work done, and doesn't
| emphasize selecting for the ability to create things that
| people want to use. I also find the coding skills selection
| kind of amusing since they had to create a simplified
| programming language (Go) because so many of their 'leet
| coding new graduates couldn't handle C++ correctly. Perhaps
| being able to 'leet code in your sleep doesn't really make
| you a "wonderful" engineer either.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| From the outside, Alphabet seems to do a very good job when
| it comes to engineering. They have very little downtime,
| fewer embarrassing security moments than most, youtube is
| far better technically than the competition, etc.
|
| It's just that they aren't building things that people want
| to use, but that's a failure of management and incentives.
| bena wrote:
| Eh. Yes and no.
|
| Homebrew may be a wonderful product, but that doesn't make
| the creator a wonderful engineer. Useful things can be
| poorly created. And this is not to shit on either Homebrew
| or Max Howell. I personally do not know if Howell is a
| wonderful engineer or not. He's obviously competent enough
| to ship working software. That's not nothing.
|
| And everyone has an idea on how to improve everything.
| Sometimes we're right, sometimes we're wrong. And even when
| we're right, it doesn't make us right all the time. You
| can't really select for "the ability to create things that
| people want to use". No one's track record is flawless.
| It's very nearly a crapshoot.
|
| Basically, you're putting Howell on a pedestal, in much the
| same manner you're accusing others of doing so with Google
| employees.
|
| I think traveler01 does have a valid question. Essentially,
| with all of their engineers, why is Google so limited? And
| I don't think it's a matter of not being able to ship stuff
| that people use. Google Drive, GMail, etc. They just don't
| seem to be able to monetize beyond ads. Maybe their fault
| isn't in pure engineering.
|
| And to be fair to the hiring process at Google at the time
| he interviewed, Google was an "all yes" kind of place. If
| anyone had any sort of hesitation, that could cause a
| candidate to be rejected. Their philosophy was that it was
| better to reject a good candidate than hire a bad one. So
| all he had to do was have one off hour, and that could have
| killed his entire interview. I personally don't think being
| rejected by Google's hiring committee is a mark against
| anyone. To get even that far requires a certain level of
| skill and/or talent.
| jsnell wrote:
| > I think traveler01 does have a valid question.
| Essentially, with all of their engineers, why is Google
| so limited? [...] They just don't seem to be able to
| monetize beyond ads.
|
| Google's non-ads businesses are about $60 billion / year
| revenue. That seems like quite a lot!
|
| To put it in context, that non-ads business would be in
| the top 20 for all tech companies by revenue. More than
| e.g. Oracle or Cisco. Roughly the same as IBM or HP. A
| bit smaller than Intel. Those are not small or
| unsuccessful companies (e.g. Oracle has 140k employees).
|
| It actually seems pretty amazing that what HN thinks is
| Google's failed side hustle is comparable to the entire
| business of what would have been considered tech giants a
| few years ago.
| bena wrote:
| And that's a fair response to the question.
|
| But it is true that the vast bulk of their revenue does
| come from ads. So it gets complicated.
|
| If you were to take away their non-ad revenue, Google
| would be fine-ish. If you were to take away their ad
| revenue, Google would be in serious trouble.
|
| Compare with Microsoft. Their biggest revenue source is
| Cloud services. And that's only about a third of their
| total revenue. And it also includes "server products".
|
| Why is Google unable to diversify to the level of
| Microsoft? The products are ostensibly there, they just
| can't make money from them. Or the only money they can
| make from them are by virtue of selling ads on them.
| jsnell wrote:
| Diversification takes time. In 2011, their non-ads
| business was about $1 billion / year. That revenue has
| grown by 60x in 11 years, so about 50%/year growth for
| more than a decade. For most businesses those numbers are
| an amazing success story. It's only in comparison to the
| once-in-a-lifetime search ads business that this would
| look disappointing.
|
| Microsoft already had diverse businesses 40 years ago,
| and have "just" needed to maintain that. They're now
| diverse by default as long as not too many of those
| existing lines of business fail. No matter how successful
| a new business of theirs is, it's really hard for it to
| grow fast enough to threaten that diversity.
| illiarian wrote:
| > It actually seems pretty amazing that what HN thinks is
| Google's failed side hustle is comparable to the entire
| business of what would have been considered tech giants a
| few years ago.
|
| Because it all pales in comparison to what actually
| powers Google: ads. To the point that there are
| persistent and growing rumours that GCP may be if not on
| the chopping block, but greatly de-prioritised (it's part
| of the 26-billion Google Cloud).
|
| It's also weird to me that people always look at revenue
| only. As if net income doesn't matter.
|
| For example [1], non-ad business may have brought in 60
| billion in revenue, but what it is I see: "The increase
| in other cost of revenues from 2021 to 2022 was primarily
| due to increases in data center costs and other
| operations costs as well as hardware costs." And that
| cost is _77 billion_.
|
| Guess what Google's the non-ad businesses are: "Google
| other revenues increased ... from 2021 to 2022 primarily
| driven by growth in YouTube non- advertising _and
| hardware revenues_ ", "Google Cloud's infrastructure and
| platform services were the largest drivers of growth in
| Google Cloud Platform."
|
| So a large chunk of that revenue is eaten by the costs of
| generating that revenue. Google cloud lost 3 billion,
| other bets lost 6 billion etc.
|
| Meanwhile all other costs of revenue are a 49 billion,
| compared to over 200 billion in revenue from ads.
|
| So how do those businesses inderectly depend on ads? Ads
| business _subsidises them_. Despite the size of those
| other businesses very few, if any, are successful (as in:
| actually earn money).
|
| [1] All quotes and numbers from Google's own 10-K: https:
| //abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/20230203_alphabet_10K.pd...
| JustLurking2022 wrote:
| Just to clarify on the Go point - that was all made up BS
| from Rob Pike.
| tester756 wrote:
| >Remember when the person who created homebrew couldn't get
| a job at google.
|
| That tree reverse meme?
|
| he made it up
| KRAKRISMOTT wrote:
| Ignore the engineers for now, Google is chock full of
| product manager. What the hell have they been doing?
| rvnx wrote:
| Messengers.
| adrr wrote:
| Trying to figure out what to rename Google Workspaces
| too. It's been two years, time for a new name. Also
| working on the next version of instant messenger to
| replace google meet since it is also a few years old.
| Maybe we'll see Google Hangouts 2.0.
| time_to_smile wrote:
| Good product people have always been visionary, lead by a
| strong sense of design and understanding of how to meet
| the user needs.
|
| Product Managers are the modern day bureaucrats created
| to reduce the individual impact on product and make PMs
| hot swappable like engineers (who I also think are better
| when they they have the aforementioned skills).
|
| Google should be considered in object lesson in the
| problems of trying to bureaucratize product creation.
| jack_riminton wrote:
| This nails it (I used to be a PM, now I'm an engineer)
| The PMs job has become so much about process, that any
| 'product sense' is completely disregarded because it
| can't be measured objectively.
|
| Truly great products e.g. the original iPhone, rarely
| have PMs
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The original iPhone did very clearly and famously have a
| product manager. It was the same person that was also
| responsible to paper of CEO.
| jack_riminton wrote:
| Ken Kocienda one of the first engineers working on the
| iPhone disagrees with you on that https://twitter.com/koc
| ienda/status/1529521111104299008?s=20
| raverbashing wrote:
| Did any innovative product, at its inception, come from a
| 'product manager'? (especially at google)
|
| They have their place in the org, but I don't see much
| creativity from them.
| snotrockets wrote:
| Go isn't replacement for C++, and no one can handle C++.
| TingPing wrote:
| Moving from C++ is the most reasonable choice ever. It is
| very complex and 20 developers who use it could come up
| with 20 solutions given freedom. Standardizing on a simple
| language is just good for collaboration.
| ravenstine wrote:
| Perhaps it's overly reductionist, but I think a lot of The
| Google's issues come down to their self-image. To this day
| they're stuck in the year 2006 when everybody and their
| grandma saw them as "cool", "innovative", "not Micro$oft",
| and "not evil." Most average joes don't believe those
| things anymore and just see The Google as the default
| thingamahoozie for looking up stuff on their phone. The
| Google believed they could grow rapidly and structure
| themselves with ordered-chaos because they were the chosen
| ones. Their road has yet to have become bumpy enough that
| they get knocked down a peg and forced to look at
| themselves in the mirror. Their hubris has allowed them to
| believe that they have no serious competition; just because
| your competition isn't actively competing _now_ doesn 't
| mean they won't be down the road when you're weak.
|
| In regards to engineering, the quality of engineering is
| largely overrated and isn't even that well understood in
| the first place. Most systems are poorly engineered, and
| many engineering teams are inefficient, not because of the
| years of experience of the engineers or even so much their
| talent but because of bad management. Senior and lead
| engineers can massage a junior writing l33t code into only
| submitting PRs that are competently written. But if
| management gives engineering lip service while undermining
| their ability to write quality code, and the engineers who
| actually care end up leaving as a result, then all you're
| going to get is endless duct-taping and half-assed
| projects. Worse yet, you get almost nothing but makework
| projects that go nowhere because project manager #8,592
| needs to look important to save their job.
| monksy wrote:
| The take isn't exactly wrong.
|
| There is a lot of stuff that you see come out of google
| and you have to wonder. Why is this successful in this
| environment? They have a lot of people that I would say
| it's fair to claim they're high IQ, but low on experience
| and the ability to build something wonderful. (Which is
| why it's frustrating to see their arch [and AWS for the
| matter] build weird components and force their practices
| in the industry)
|
| What would be great to see.. foster an engineering
| culture based on experience there. Encourage their
| engineers to contribute to the world. (Rather than
| waiting and spinning out large projects like K8s)
| eldavido wrote:
| I think there's something to this. Another perspective
| might be Apple vs Intel, where one of my friends worked
| (at both) in fairly senior roles 5+ years.
|
| The problem is that companies get really good at solving
| yesterday's problems. In Intel's case, that was making
| great CPUs for desktop PCs and servers. I have no doubt
| that the absolute pinnacle of desktop PC CPU engineering,
| was done at Intel in the last ~10 years.
|
| The problem is, the world changes. Growth shifts from PC
| to mobile. People in datacenters start worrying more
| about cost and energy efficiency and build their own ARM
| parts. The landscape shifts, and the company is still
| fighting yesterday's battle. But it doesn't matter
| anymore-the basis of competition has shifted.
|
| I think it's very difficult to pivot a company's core
| "basis of competition", or as you've elegantly put it,
| "self-image". What are we best at? Why are people getting
| promoted? Who's in leadership roles? The answers to these
| things need to shift over time, but most companies can't.
| This is why companies rise and fall.
|
| I think a big problem with Google overall, is that their
| self-image isn't really customer-oriented. It's more
| inward-looking, "we're great engineers", "we're not
| evil", "we build the best distributed systems". The meta
| lesson is perhaps, orientation around serving your
| customers is the only thing you can fix, long-term.
| Amazon gets this. The problem is, it's way more nebulous
| and hard to pin down, than some of the more specific
| things Google has anchored on for the past years.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Their self-image is VERY customer-oriented. It's just
| that we're not the customers.
| oldgradstudent wrote:
| > The problem is that companies get really good at
| solving yesterday's problems. In Intel's case, that was
| making great CPUs for desktop PCs and servers. I have no
| doubt that the absolute pinnacle of desktop PC CPU
| engineering, was done at Intel in the last ~10 years
|
| Had Intel maintained its competency in designing and
| manufacturing CPUs, their situation would have been much
| better.
|
| They surrendered the process technology lead to TSMC, and
| let Apple make far superior laptop CPUs without a good
| response for years.
|
| They failed in what was supposed to be their core
| competency.
|
| And, of course, in anything outside CPUs and Chipset,
| Intel is comically bad.
| daniel_reetz wrote:
| Watch Google Talks on youtube - it's really striking.
| Every single one contains at least one Googler commenting
| on how smart Googlers are. Stuff like "Everyone at Google
| is so smart".
| strgcmc wrote:
| Riffing on this: another aspect of how business-life is
| harder for Google is, who actually is the customer?
|
| For Amazon (at least in the classic retail sense), the
| customer is clear and obvious: the person buying a thing
| from your website, who wants good-selection, cheap and
| fast/delivered to their door. It's relatively easy to
| orient your entire company around the question of: "but
| is this actually good for The Customer?" That is, until
| you feel you've established your business model well
| enough, that you no longer need to focus on creating
| customer value, and instead turn towards growing your
| business value (i.e. the shift of 3p sellers going from
| "gee this is a cool way to expand selection for customers
| beyond what Amazon 1p offers by itself", into "wow this
| is just a cesspool for fakes and fraud, but who cares
| since they all pay fees to Amazon").
|
| For Google, with the nature of the search business and
| the fact that it is their primary cash cow, the
| incentives are "mixed" to put it mildly. The true
| customer of Google is not the users, but the advertisers.
| The users are simply an ingredient to be fed into the
| advertising engine -- any decisions you make to benefit
| the user, are only from the perspective of, not pissing
| them off so much that they leave your platform (and even
| that, is a sliding scale depending on the viability of
| alternatives -- Bing along wasn't very viable, but Bing +
| ChatGPT might be...).
|
| In a twisted way, maybe comparing Google to Amazon is
| more like this:
|
| - G's search users = A's warehouse workers
|
| - G's advertisers = A's shoppers
|
| How well does Amazon treat its warehouse workers? Only as
| well as needed to achieve 2 goals: not break employment
| laws too egregiously, and not churn through the entire
| employable labor pool too quickly.
| thrashh wrote:
| Bell Labs and like we're throwing money at a wall too
| without a clear customer and yet they still invented the
| transistor, the PC, digital video cameras and so on.
|
| Wtf is Google doing? They don't make good products and
| they don't invent that much useful stuff. They're like
| the rich kid with a bunch of money trying random
| different things without focusing on one thing to get
| good at it.
|
| I'm sure at this point Google is just a system to finally
| pay engineers a lot of money so they can retire earlier.
| Everyone that I've ever known that wants to work for
| Google is doing it to cash out, myself included.
| brookst wrote:
| All good points, and it's even worse for Google: the
| websites providing ad inventory are another important
| customer. And their needs (more traffic) are in conflict
| with end users doing a search (get answer quickly).
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| I have generally found that people don't take project
| managers very seriously, sort of like a human interface
| to a spreadsheet. Where are you that they are actually
| creating projects?
| browningstreet wrote:
| Watched the 60 Minutes interview with Pichai last night. He's
| really... unimpressive. He shouldn't be doing MSM interviews
| if that's the tenor of his performance.
|
| Google is supposed to be a technical firebrand and their
| cloud isn't dominant, and their AI product and market
| position got punk'd by Microsoft... and he's out there saying
| things like AI will be a bigger discovery than fire. Which
| calls into question: so why isn't Google a leader in AI, or
| seem to be?
|
| It's a bad PR thread for Google, and he lacked any Q factor
| in those interview clips.
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| He comes off to me as someone in a funk, or stupor, or
| depression. Like he's out of touch, out of grasp with
| realities, and I think changes and things at google have
| probably hurt their culture quite a bit over the years. The
| best engineers in the world will churn out shit, if they
| aren't inspired to at least do exciting things sometimes,
| and I think Google's lost that thing that made them excite
| developers.
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| I imagine they have some AI solution in reach.
|
| I wouldn't want somebody to give presentations as a head of
| Google. On the contrary, I hate when people produce vapor.
|
| Microsoft bought their AI solution. We will see if they can
| successfully integrate it. I am not yet sure about that. I
| hardly call that innovation though.
| troyvit wrote:
| "Embrace, extend, extinguis" was Microsoft's way to
| address widely used standards in its early quest to be a
| monopoly [1]. What they're doing with their AI solution
| seems like a similar case.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_ex
| tinguis...
| [deleted]
| ur-whale wrote:
| > He's really... unimpressive.
|
| That's putting it mildly
|
| > He shouldn't be doing interviews
|
| He should not be running Google at all, period.
| nickv wrote:
| I can't help but feel like Google is going through their
| "Steve Ballmer CEO Phase". I wonder who will be the next
| CEO to fix things.
| 0zemp1c wrote:
| he's a good choice for "Good Times"...when the money is
| rolling in and you're on top, it is okay to have an
| inoffensive friendly supportive type in the CEO chair
|
| those times are gone though and Google definitely needs
| someone more proactive and focused
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Google is supposed to be a technical firebrand
|
| They used to be, but they haven't been that for a long,
| long time.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Google produces other products than search - Android for
| example. Waymo is the best self-driving car company (but the
| problem is self-driving cars won't work for a long time, if
| ever).
|
| The problem is all Google's products use the free-plus-
| advertising model _and_ this has caused them to drift to
| serving the advertisers rather than serving the users. And
| that makes it hard to switch gears to offer more benefits to
| users.
|
| The main problem is Google shifted from making search better
| for their users
| beached_whale wrote:
| It was a google paper that open ai is based on, no?
| herval wrote:
| that makes it even worse, doesn't it?
| beached_whale wrote:
| The knowledge being out there is better, how we will use
| it has a not so good history. As for google, maybe it was
| out of their control and the researchers had explicit
| rights to publish their work
| londons_explore wrote:
| It's all a shortcoming of management and incentives. They
| have plenty of smart people, plenty of amazing tech, but they
| are 100% failing to deploy the right people on building the
| right products for the right customers.
| londons_explore wrote:
| They also don't give enough polish to their products.
|
| For example, the Nexus 5 (2013!) had a bug - if you took 7
| photos in quick succession, it wouldn't save photo 3 and 4.
| For example, you're photographing someone doing a dance,
| and you want a photo on each beat, so you tap the shutter
| to the beat of the music.
|
| On a 2022 Pixel 7, 10 years on...... The exact same bug.
| delfinom wrote:
| >They also don't give enough polish to their products.
|
| Well yea, Google copied old-Microsoft's incentive
| structure of working on new features for promotions.
| rurp wrote:
| In some cases it's even worse and they are outright
| hostile to certain groups. Google Maps has been crippled
| for _years_ for anyone using it outside of internet
| service. One of the most basic features, saving a point
| on a map, is completely broken. Route finding and offline
| maps are unreliable in rural areas.
|
| I get that people who rarely leave major cities are
| Google's favorite and most profitable user demographic,
| but there are still many millions of people outside of
| that group. Google can get away with sneering at them
| while they have a profitable monopoly, but once they
| breaks up they are in deep trouble. Their culture of
| half-baked and frequently shuttered projects is so
| ingrained at this point it's going to be enormously
| difficult to change.
| binkHN wrote:
| > ...how the hell was Microsoft with OpenAI that came up with
| the biggest hit in AI?
|
| Microsoft is just an investor that got access to a product
| that OpenAI has been working on for the last 7 years. OpenAI
| has a single purpose and doesn't have to worry about
| displaying ads.
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| If Google's CEO were really visionary he'd invest 10
| billion and half his engineers to support Claude and that
| AI company's trajectory, because deepmind seems a bit
| lackluster lately, or maybe they just have their own
| research agendas that aren't in line with industry demands
| or something.
| revelio wrote:
| The latter. DeepMind people have always been highly
| impressive but their focus was things like winning at
| video games, protein folding, etc.
| ugh123 wrote:
| Lack of Product sense. Not an engineering problem.
| potatolicious wrote:
| This is a pet topic of mine to think about - so my (probably
| over-long) two cents below...
|
| For context, I worked at Google for ~4 years, and have also
| been at two other FAANGs, as well as done time at VC-funded
| startups. I'd like to think I have a good gamut of
| experiences to compare against both in the realm of smaller
| companies and massive megacorps.
|
| Google's problems are (from most severe IMO to least severe):
|
| - Poor senior management. Other posts touch on the middle-
| manager-heavy ranks of Google, but IMO that misses the forest
| for the trees. A bloated middle management layer is but a
| symptom of a sclerotic upper management. To add some color to
| this:
|
| - Google has a fundamental ethos that I haven't seen
| described in other writings and lacks a good term for it. In
| my head I call it the hypothesis of the free-range engineer.
| The foundational belief is that upper management's job is to
| get out of the way of the top talent they've hired. Product
| ideas should come from the bottom of the company - and even
| more importantly, they should succeed through intra-company
| competition. This is probably _the_ singular most impactful
| organizational cultural belief at Google, and it informs how
| the entire company is structured. My position: the entire
| hypothesis is crap, and is a huge part of what holds the
| company back.
|
| - The net result of Google's culture is that upper management
| sets _very_ little product direction, in favor of letting
| individual teams set their own priorities and ship
| independently. This means a _lot_ of duplicative products and
| a _lot_ of products that don 't integrate with each other
| (see: Workspace account sign-in and... _literally everything_
| ). Upper management has a light touch and is _extremely_
| loathe to mandate standards, resulting in a really mind-
| blowing level of product fragmentation. Much of this seems to
| be a deathly allergy that the company developed after the
| total and utter failure of Google+, where upper management
| _did_ exert direct influence over product. The lesson they
| took from G+ 's failure wasn't "have a better top-down
| product strategy next time" and was instead "top-down product
| strategy bad".
|
| - Upper management turnover is excessive. All big companies
| suffer from re-orgs, but Google practically makes re-orgs a
| sport. In addition to upper management being extremely loathe
| to give product direction, upper management (by this I mean
| Director-and-up) rotates alarmingly often, and each time it's
| accompanied with a re-org where projects are killed or
| deprioritized. I don't think in my entire time at Google I
| ever saw a multi-year roadmap actually executed to completion
| - each and every time some senior leader is replaced and the
| entire roadmap and strategy rewritten.
|
| - Google has poor product strategy overall. The company tends
| to swing for a lot of home-runs but structures these
| endeavors poorly. There are a _lot_ of ambitious PMs
| advocating for huge multi-year megaprojects that end up being
| total failures. Upper management is credulous and doesn 't
| demand proof of viability prior to sinking a ton of resources
| over multiple years into a thing (this feeds the turnover
| problem above - where inevitably when a multi-year thing
| flops heads roll, when the real problem is that upper
| management did not exert scrutiny over the project sooner).
| Big, ambitious goals are good - but viability needs to be
| validated quickly and continuously throughout the development
| process so that requirements can change (and yes, so that the
| project can be killed expediently if the fundamentals aren't
| there). Again, a failure of Google's upper management.
|
| - Continuing on that theme, Google's upper management is
| naive and credulous when it comes to product forecasts. PMs
| seeking to have their projects approved (especially big
| megaprojects) will make up absolutely _bonkers_ projections
| for fundamental success metrics, and are often not seriously
| challenged on them. Senior leadership is ready to believe
| numbers that are facially absurd, and then are surprised when
| the product fails to live up to the unrealistic expectations.
| This phenomenon also drives the turnover /re-org problem
| above - since when the product whiffs the metrics by a mile
| _somebody_ has to get the boot - but the real problem was
| believing the bad projections to begin with!
|
| - Promotion-driven development is a problem. But unlike most
| prognostications about Google I don't think it's their _main_
| problem. Leadership is at the core of Google 's problems and
| promo-driven development is just an exacerbating factor IMO.
| But there _is_ a serious problem with how Google structures
| incentives for ICs and middle management. The biggest
| concrete effect of this is that after launching, engineering
| teams _empty out_ rapidly as people sense that no promos are
| forthcoming for working on the product, and look for greener
| pastures. This exacerbates the effects from above, where --
| through an array of leadership failures -- the product was
| already on thin ice. The collapse of the engineering teams on
| it further buries the product and sends it on a death spiral.
|
| Anyway, this is already running way too long. At this point I
| think there needs to be a _fundamental_ change to how Google
| pursues product if they hope to turn this boat around.
| mrkramer wrote:
| >Google has poor product strategy overall. The company
| tends to swing for a lot of home-runs but structures these
| endeavors poorly.
|
| I wouldn't say so; I mean they like to experiment a lot but
| their product strategy is good in the long term e.g. Google
| Search, Google Mail, Google Maps, YouTube, Google Chrome,
| Android etc. If 5 experiments fail and 1 succeeds and
| brings billions of dollars in revenue that's win in their
| book and in my book too.
|
| Basically what Google is doing is building its family of
| apps to capture more attention and sell more ads. The same
| thing Facebook does with its family of apps e.g. Facebook,
| Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. The goal is to
| capture as much attention as they can and then sell ads
| because that's what their business model is all about. Zuck
| even tried to acquire Twitter back in the day plus Snapchat
| as well. I doubt he liked the products or the people behind
| it, he just wanted to get rid of competition which was
| stealing attention or screen time from his family of apps.
| The same thing is with Google, that's why they are
| constantly pushing new apps and services (to gain market
| share and user attention and then to push ads).
| potatolicious wrote:
| > _" Google Search, Google Mail, Google Maps, YouTube,
| Google Chrome, Android etc."_
|
| This is a vindication of Google's M&A department and an
| indictment of Google's actual product orgs. Out of this
| list of 6 major Earth-shaking products only 3 came from
| Google itself. YouTube, Android, and Maps were all
| acquisitions.
|
| And of the homegrown successes the last one of note
| (Chrome) was released 15 years ago. In other words:
| Google has been _completely_ unable to produce a mega-hit
| product for 15 years by itself.
|
| > " _If 5 experiments fail and 1 succeeds and brings
| billions of dollars in revenue that 's win in their book
| and in my book too."_
|
| Yes, and this is how all other tech companies operate as
| well, the problem is that Google experiments
| incompetently.
|
| Take for example the recent and total failure of Stadia -
| they sunk truckloads of money into developing the
| underlying technology, which is legitimately impressive.
| And then they slapped a substandard (let's be honest,
| _less_ than substandard) go-to-market strategy around it.
| And after it predictably floundered they walked away from
| the thing entirely.
|
| Meanwhile on the other side of the fence Microsoft
| developed _basically the same product_ , but with a
| better go-to-market strategy has now carved out a niche
| for themselves in streaming gaming.
|
| Both companies experimented, one got the product to
| stick, the other flailed around before declaring the
| experiment a failure - even though within the competitive
| landscape it was obviously viable.
|
| Or for something more currently topical - Google
| _literally invented_ LLMs but failed to productize it.
| They put in the money and failed to get the result where
| another company did.
|
| The list goes on and on. The claims of "see what sticks"
| is a superficial mantra and its practitioners often
| forget that _how_ you go about experimentation affects
| your odds of success. Google has IMO one of the worst
| experimentation processes (or really just what other
| companies call product strategy) in BigTech.
|
| Google has taken the notion that you can swing at
| multiple balls that are tossed your way and generalized
| it to mean that one doesn't have to be any good at
| hitting the ball, because given a sufficient large N
| pitches you're gonna get a hit anyway. This is poor
| business strategy and it's showing.
| mrkramer wrote:
| >Out of this list of 6 major Earth-shaking products only
| 3 came from Google itself. YouTube, Android, and Maps
| were all acquisitions.
|
| They tried to compete with YouTube, it didn't work out
| but hey we have deep pocket, let's buy them. Successful
| investment because they bought YouTube for $2bn and last
| year YouTube generated $30bn in revenue. All done and
| lifted to sky by Google. Android was pre-emptive
| acquisition against Microsoft and its mobile Windows OS
| and its search engine Bing. Today Android is the most
| used OS in the world and it comes with Google apps
| preinstalled. Also all done by Google because as far as I
| understood, they built modern Android OS from the ground
| up with the Linux kernel ofc. I'm not sure about Maps but
| I bet there was also some long term vision/strategy there
| as well. You don't have to innovate all the time if you
| have strong core business and deep pocket for
| acquisitions, innovation happens elsewhere.
|
| Also turning acquisitions into successful businesses and
| money making machines is a difficult task. Not every
| company can do it and some companies even go bankrupt
| because of acquisitions that gone bad.
|
| >Take for example the recent and total failure of Stadia
| - they sunk truckloads of money into developing the
| underlying technology, which is legitimately impressive.
| And then they slapped a substandard (let's be honest,
| less than substandard) go-to-market strategy around it.
| And after it predictably floundered they walked away from
| the thing entirely.
|
| Stadia was too early in the game, something like
| Altavista to Google. Cloud gaming market needs to mature
| and eventually some successful cloud gaming company will
| pop up. I also don't think they really cared that much
| about cloud gaming because let's be honest they jumped on
| the bandwagon of cloud gaming just like they are jumping
| now on LLMs hype.
|
| >Or for something more currently topical - Google
| literally invented LLMs but failed to productize it. They
| put in the money and failed to get the result where
| another company did.
|
| Too early to judge. We will see in the next couple of
| years.
| delfinom wrote:
| >How a company with so much money, so many wonderful
| engineers can't produce a source of income other than the
| search engine?
|
| Because they lack product management at the executive level
| downwards. With no goals set for current and future products,
| the engineers downstairs are allowed to play....a little too
| much which means the company as a whole flounders.
| gsatic wrote:
| Google is not going anywhere and they will easily replicate
| anything OpenAI does. Its not that magical.
|
| Why they still rely on search/advertising is well known -
| Replacing a 150 Billion $$$ source of revenue is not a simple
| thing.
|
| Its like trying to replace everything ppl do in a midsized
| rich country with something else.
|
| And compared to Facebook which is still 99% dependent on Ads,
| Google is much more diversified (total revenue is north of
| 250 billion). They have cloud, youtube, docs, google play,
| all the alphabet experiments etc. And most importantly half
| the worlds online advertising (exchanges/ auctions etc) uses
| Google ad tech. So Google is not going anywhere.
|
| They just look at the world through a very different lens due
| to their size. I am guessing they dont see the point of
| keeping businesses that produce a few hundred million in
| revenue running, cause they really need businesses that
| produce a few hundred billion to keep all their free stuff
| (search, email, chat, chrome, android, video, r&d for other
| stuff etc) afloat.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| >Google is not going anywhere and they will easily
| replicate anything OpenAI does.
|
| They've had a while now, and all they've come up with is
| Bard.
| Angostura wrote:
| > they will easily replicate anything OpenAI does
|
| ... not if it threatens their cash cow they won't. It's not
| a technical challenge, its a business model challenge
| somsak2 wrote:
| > Google is much more diversified (total revenue is north
| of 250 billion)
|
| Over 80% of that revenue is still just ads though, not
| really very diversified. And even with GCP they are in a
| distant 3rd to AWS / Azure.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| OpenAI has been gobbling up Google AI talent for years now.
| The difference between ChatGPT and Bard is just comical.
| The part that you seem to be missing is that users will
| gladly jump ship if something better comes along and it's
| kind of coming, and people are already jumping ship. Google
| hit the ceiling, which is awesome, but now, there is
| nowhere for them to go except back down. They're an AD
| company fighting against tech companies, they will do
| everything to protect their cash cow while people continue
| to innovate and move way past keyword search.
| philistine wrote:
| Decrying the imminent death of Google is ridiculous, but
| what you're doing is also ridiculous. Google has fragile
| legs. They are not diversified enough, and a blow to their
| cash cow could severely hurt them. Losing advertising
| dollars in search could even hurt the YouTube revenue
| stream, since it's the same advertisers for both products.
|
| Google could be in deep trouble in five years.
| illiarian wrote:
| > Google is much more diversified (total revenue is north
| of 250 billion). They have cloud, youtube, docs, google
| play, all the alphabet experiments etc.
|
| Do read their 10-K: https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/202
| 2Q4_alphabet_earnings...
|
| The only thing that realistically brings in money is ads.
| All other things are just subsidised by them.
|
| For example Google Cloud (which includes both GCP and
| workspace offerings aka docs)? Well, it _lost_ 6 billion
| dollars.
|
| > cause they really need businesses that produce a few
| hundred billion to keep all their free stuff
|
| The only such business they have is ads.
| nickv wrote:
| >>Why they still rely on search/advertising is well known -
| Replacing a 150 Billion $$$ source of revenue is not a
| simple thing.
|
| You just described The Innovators Dilemma. You'd hope
| Google, considering how everyone reveres how well run it is
| would find ways to avoid it, but they didn't not. You know
| who used to avoid the Innovators Dilemma amazingly well?
| Apple. You know who does it really well now? Microsoft.
| They literally killed their OS revenue to grow the company.
| That's the equivalent of Google killing their search
| revenue for something new. It's hard to do, but you have to
| do it in tech.
|
| >>And compared to Facebook which is still 99% dependent on
| Ads, Google is much more diversified (total revenue is
| north of 250 billion). They have cloud, youtube, docs,
| google play, all the alphabet experiments etc.
|
| In 2022, Google was 80%+ directly dependent on Ads for
| revenue, and 10.3% indirectly dependent on it. Sure, Google
| does a lot of things but 90.3% of the actual money that
| keeps the lights on is advertising. Their revenue mix is
| extremely similar to Meta.
| gsatic wrote:
| They rely on advertising sure, but the part that comes
| from Search is ~150B $ (out of 250 B $).
|
| People kind of dont realize a large chunk of their Ad
| Tech is not Search related. Its the tooling for the
| Publishers to sell ad real estate on their sites. Its the
| tooling for Advertisers to target that real estate based
| on data collected. Its the ad auctions. Its the ad
| exchanges. There is ton of shit of going on that no one
| on the planet is anywhere close to replicating.
| jsnell wrote:
| > In 2022, Google was 80%+ directly dependent on Ads for
| revenue, and 10.3% indirectly dependent on it.
|
| I assume the 10.3% is "Google Other". That's things like
| YouTube Premium, Play Store and hardware. How is any of
| that even indirectly dependent on ads?
| mattchamb wrote:
| I pay for youtube premium so that I dont see ads.
| nickv wrote:
| > YouTube Premium is dependent on ads because YouTube as
| a product is dependent on ads. Without ads, YouTube
| Premium wouldn't exist. I think the vast majority of that
| 10.3% is YouTube Premium, YouTube TV, Play Store and
| their hardware. But I still think most of those are in
| service to their ad engine.
| jsnell wrote:
| That just circular reasoning. "The company wouldn't exist
| without ads, so I will consider all this subscription and
| hardware revenue to actually be ad revenue, and then
| complain that they're too dependent on ads".
| simantel wrote:
| Google Cloud revenue (which includes Workspace revenue) was
| $26B in 2022. That's only 10% of Google's total revenue, but
| to put it in perspective, all of Salesforce did $31B.
| oldgradstudent wrote:
| Revenue is nice, but is Google Cloud profitable?
|
| I can generate huge revenues selling $100 bills for $95.
| g9yuayon wrote:
| > I kept reading news about Google's AI programs
|
| Technology is not a product. A product that uses technology
| to solve a number of clearly defined real problems is a
| product. When Google was saying AI this AI that, I had yet to
| see any product.
| daydream wrote:
| > How a company with so much money, so many wonderful
| engineers can't produce a source of income other than the
| search engine?
|
| It's like the curse of oil. Google found a revenue stream
| early on that was so massive it covered up all their other
| sins. They dealt with their problems belatedly at best.
|
| Now that revenue stream is under attack and they are
| scrambling. To put it politely.
| jack_riminton wrote:
| Continuing with the oil analogy, I wonder if they'd have
| done better if they did something similar to what Norway
| did with their oil wealth (i.e. only spend a small
| percentage on the interest earned from oil). Perhaps they
| could've spent less on all of their moonshots and focussed
| solely on AI. Hindsight is 20/20 I guess.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Google absolutely could spend 10-20% of what they
| currently do and just have absolutely massive margins.
| The problem is they'd get regulated.
| thrashh wrote:
| Well Google keeps putting out new products. And I hear you
| get promotions when you release a new product.
|
| Good products come through refinement.
|
| But every time you use most Google stuff, it feels like it's
| still version 1. When compared to competitors' products that
| they've been improving time after time, it just falls flat.
| endtime wrote:
| > Google constant failure astonish me. How a company with so
| much money, so many wonderful engineers can't produce a
| source of income other than the search engine?
|
| I have a slightly different answer than most of the other
| replies, which is that Google just got too big. I worked
| there for 10 years (left a year ago for a smaller company)
| and the amount of inefficiency and waste due to having too
| many layers of middle management with no real visibility into
| what was going on was just astounding. Over that decade they
| paid me millions of dollars in total, while canceling
| whatever I was working on almost exactly every 18 months like
| clockwork. Typically due to management issues or corporate
| politics rather than for any real technical or business
| reason.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| This has been described in many variations on HN, what
| puzzles me is why the early, loyal, employees didn't point
| out this dynamic developing.
|
| Or if they did internally, why the Board decided to ignore
| the most loyal and proven.
|
| Googler #1 to #1000 were clearly not fools, and by the
| 2010s they very likely had enough credibility to be taken
| seriously if several dozen of them said this.
| revelio wrote:
| I was there early on (not in the first 1000 though), and
| some people did try to point it out, but it was very hard
| because there's no way to say "maybe we can't hire more
| people without becoming less elite" in a way that sounds
| non-asshole-ish. So such sentiments tended to be voiced
| in private. Also it's just so vague. What is the right
| size for a company like Google? How many people should
| you hire for projects like AI or self driving cars? And
| finally, it was totally against the founder's and top
| executives self image. They felt that the potential of
| the company was nearly unlimited, that they would never
| run out of ideas. So they just kept hiring, over and over
| again, without any connection between headcount and need.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| > but it was very hard because there's no way to say
| "maybe we can't hire more people without becoming less
| elite" in a way that sounds non-asshole-ish.'
|
| Hmm this sounds like the concern was badly communicated
| because this phrasing is both unnecessary and not quite
| correct either. (since it is possible to keep recruiting
| to a very high standard even during exponential growth
| via spending exponentially more resources)
|
| The straightforward logic of:
|
| linear increase in organization size = exponential
| increase in organization complexity = exponential
| frictional losses
|
| would have been much clearer.
| revelio wrote:
| _> > since it is possible to keep recruiting to a very
| high standard even during exponential growth via spending
| exponentially more resources_
|
| Since when? You're assuming the pool of employees
| available to recruit is infinite which is clearly not
| true.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| It's clearly larger then 1 million worldwide, which is
| what matters to a company of Google's size.
|
| It will breakdown if the company wants to run multiple
| Manhattan Projects simultaneously, but anything short of
| that is technically possible.
| inconceivable wrote:
| all those individual contributor people got rich and left
| the company.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| I can believe half of them did, or maybe 2/3, but that
| still leaves hundreds of original Googlers who could
| speak up.
| inconceivable wrote:
| how old are you? have you ever tried to get a group of 10
| people, forget about thousands, to do something in a way
| that you think is "correct"? especially something worth
| millions and millions of dollars?
|
| this is beyond the plane of rationality and the social
| forces take on a life of their own. it's not a math
| problem.
| illnewsthat wrote:
| > They had Bing running in the background for years losing
| truckloads of money.
|
| Maybe a nitpick, but I think Bing has been profitable on its
| own for a while now.
|
| (2015) https://time.com/4084975/microsoft-bing-search-engine-
| profit...
| moufestaphio wrote:
| Yeah, Bing has been consistently profitable for a long time.
|
| People mock it because its not bringing in obscene amounts
| that google search does, but it's revenues have consistently
| been growing for years: https://fourweekmba.com/bing-revenue/
|
| $11.59B is pretty damn good revenue for a 'laughing stock'.
| Especially Consider that gaming 'only' was $16.23B.
| TrueSlacker0 wrote:
| That link shows revenue not profit.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| They kinda did that with ChromeOS + Google Docs with offline
| mode. The problem for Google is that while it was a solid
| investment for MS to persue cloud services to compete with
| Google, I don't think it would have been a good investment the
| other way around. Chrome is really the only desktop product
| that makes sense for Google because it pushes people into their
| ecosystem online. Creating something like a standalone OS or a
| standalone office software would have gone in the "wrong
| direction" for Google, taking people off their site rather than
| taking people there.
|
| Also on a total sidenote, if you told me 5 years ago that Bing
| would be a serious threat to Google I would have a laughed.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| I moved to Bing a year ago, as 1) Google became a senseless
| SEO swamp 2) they don't allow VPN.
| hrunt wrote:
| > Also on a total sidenote, if you told me 5 years ago that
| Bing would be a serious threat to Google I would have a
| laughed.
|
| If you had told me 3 months ago that Bing would be a serious
| threat to Google, I still would have laughed. That's how much
| impact the ChatGPT integration had for Bing -- overnight.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| I've used bing with gpt and it's way worse than ChatGPT idk
| what you mean. I'd just as well use Google tbh. It wasn't
| impressive.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| The thing is: Google is threatened for the first time in
| its decades of history. It might not be better, yet, but
| it definitely is a real and existential threat to Google.
| visarga wrote:
| Google is threatened by MS and OA, OA is threatened by
| Stable Diffusion and MiniGPT-4. We are wondering if there
| will still be developer work in 10 years. Everyone is
| threatened.
| lerchmo wrote:
| I think chatgtp itself with access to search / wolfram /
| apps etc is a more serious competitor than Bing.
| tpmx wrote:
| I just can't get over the ugly visual design and
| haphazard UX on bing.com.
|
| For instance: That Microsoft Rewards counter? Ugh.
| impulser_ wrote:
| Did ChatGPT even make Bing a threat?
|
| Bing has only 10m+ downloads on Android. Not even a top 200
| app.
|
| Samsung switch too Bing will hurt Samsung more than Google.
| rafark wrote:
| "Only has 10 million downloads" wow
| rmbyrro wrote:
| I was not at all surprised, to be honest. ChatGPT took over
| about 90-95% of my what I would previously resort to
| Google. Since Microsoft was dealing cards at OpenAI, it was
| just a matter of time...
| MattGaiser wrote:
| How are you dealing with it just manufacturing answers it
| does not readily have? Or is that pretty much the same as
| SEO spam and easy to filter out?
| rmbyrro wrote:
| GPT4 is much better at it. So far, I haven't seen it
| hallucinate. GPT3 hallucinates terribly, but not that
| often, and it's fairly predictable in what kinds of
| questions it's more inclined to hallucinate.
| derefr wrote:
| Can you give examples of the average pre-ChatGPT Google
| queries you were doing, that ChatGPT can fully handle?
|
| Personally -- and having not tried ChatGPT for this -- I
| don't think ChatGPT would do well with resolving the
| kinds of queries I consider Google "good at."
|
| To me, the place where Google wins over Bing, DDG, etc.
| is when I know there _must_ exist some page that
| _uniquely_ talks about some extremely niche overlap of
| concepts; but I don 't know any specific "natural key"
| keywords to refer to the that overlapped-set-of-concepts,
| and instead only have a "cloud of highly-correlated
| keywords for the individual concepts involved" to throw
| into the search box.
|
| For example, if I'm trying to conjure from the aether a
| discussion people are having about an issue I'm facing
| with some buggy behavior in an API -- where that buggy
| behavior doesn't spit out any distinctive error message
| to use in the search.
|
| I could see ChatGPT being good at a limited version of
| this problem, where I could give it e.g. several
| definitions of a word (= correlated keywords), and it
| could tell me the word that fits those definitions.
|
| But the full version of the problem -- pointing you at
| (or regurgitating) the one unique conversation that most
| highly correlates with your keyword cloud -- essentially
| implies an Internet-scale "language model": one where
| there are unique vertices for every unique URL. Which, if
| you think about it, is what a traditional search engine's
| index is: a very dumb, but very large correlational
| language model, where that "dumbness" is a valuable
| constraint meaning that queries are able to be run map-
| reduced across many nodes.
|
| Is there something I'm missing here, that makes
| Bing+ChatGPT better at these types of queries than Google
| is?
|
| Or are the advantages ChatGPT is bringing to the table
| here, in areas that have nothing to do with making search
| engines better at the things they're already "the best
| tool for the job" at, and instead are in solving problems
| that could be solved any number of other ways (e.g.
| querying a search _assistant_ such as Siri /Alexa; or
| pulling up an encyclopedia article or textbook relevant
| to the subject and just reading it) such that a search
| engine wouldn't necessarily be the first tool you'd
| search for?
| nemothekid wrote:
| There are several engineering tasks that I've just found
| explained better by ChatGPT than scouring Google for out
| of date documentation or abandoned forum posts. For
| example a while back I needed to encode some AAC audio
| frames into the ADTS format. In the work I've been doing
| recently, this isn't a hard task given you have the spec.
| The problem was I couldn't find the spec on Google -
| arguably it's not well supported either.
|
| No problem for ChatGPT however which was not only able to
| write the code, but write it in Rust - the target
| language Iw as going to. Now I've just found it easier to
| ask ChatGPT first then go go google.
| mort96 wrote:
| I had an example recently: I wanted to learn more about
| how certificate-based WiFi authentication worked. In the
| past, I would have used Google to find some resources on
| it, probably find that the relevant standard is called
| 802.1x, used Google to find the relevant Wikipedia
| article, skimmed that, etc. But instead of doing that, I
| just asked ChatGPT the specific questions I needed the
| answer to.
|
| When you're asking generally about a pretty basic topic
| which you just happen to not be very familiar with,
| ChatGPT is not too dissimilar from having an expert in
| the field you can chat with and ask questions to. I find
| it to be a very effective way of querying the huge
| database of information that is its training dataset.
|
| Surprisingly, the one thing it's really terrible at but
| which I would've expected it to be okay at, is writing
| config files. I sometimes ask it how to write, say, a
| systemd service file which does a particular thing, and
| it usually shows me something which looks roughly
| sensible but doesn't actually do what I wanted. Its
| nature of fancy autocomplete with no understanding really
| shines through in those cases. Its biggest downfall is
| that it has no way to recognize when it doesn't have an
| answer and is making stuff up.
| bink wrote:
| Doesn't that leave you wondering if the answer it gave
| you for certificate based auth is accurate? How do you
| verify?
| rmbyrro wrote:
| Almost anything related to programming.
|
| Geographical information about a region.
|
| What is the name of a song I have in my mind.
|
| Virtually anything else. I'm studying architecture and
| read about associations of feelings that cardinal points
| transmit in a house (north, south, east, west). Like,
| east is associated with youth because of sunrise. At
| first it wasn't obvious why, so I asked ChatGPT and it
| explained everything brilliantly to me.
|
| It takes me an order of magnitude less time to educate
| myself on ChatGPT comparing to Google.
| bentcorner wrote:
| Over the weekend I wanted a recipe for a dish I wanted to
| make and the first recipe I found required an important
| ingredient I didn't have. I thought I'd give ChatGPT a
| shot and asked it for the same recipe but not including
| that ingredient to see if it could come up with an
| alternative formulation.
|
| I'm sure that recipe exists somewhere on the internet but
| ChatGPT gave something to me in a very succinct format
| with none of the usual bullshit you deal with when
| looking through search results. ChatGPT also thankfully
| did not include the usual recipe backstory.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| I'm not the person you're replying to, but I had been
| asking this question for a while but now I'm a convert.
| Here are some of my most recent uses:
|
| how to create a multi line string in a bash script. I
| needed to encode a human-readable JSON string in a curl
| call and didn't know how. Google game me crummy tutorial
| sites, GPT gave me instructions, and when provided with
| the target, did all the formatting too.
|
| I found it also understands git well. I use git at work,
| but I almost never use anything beyond push/pull/commit
| so crazy rebases or merges and stuff I still have to
| search for instructions to remember them. Now GPT can
| just explain to me the steps for my particular case. When
| I googled things, I'd search for keywords and stuff based
| on my knowledge and piece together the steps myself.
|
| On a counter example, I recently had an intern who
| botched their config on VsCode and didn't know what
| settings to fix. I found it was easier to google search
| how to reset things than use GPT. Ymmv.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| I was a skeptic, but it's very useful and not
| hallucinatory for small and specific coding questions.
|
| For example, today I asked ChatGPT how to write a class
| method in Ruby and to explain the class << self idiom.
| Super simple stuff, but it gives accurate answers and
| it's way more convenient than Google.
|
| For this class of simple queries there's a lot of
| overhead to do a Google search and then try to filter out
| bullshit and padded results vs a super simple prompt to
| ChatGPT.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| I'm very curious what will happen when seo spammers come
| after chatgpt.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| I'm sure they'll use ChatGPT to come up with solutions.
|
| Spammers will, too, and since OpenAI has access to what
| they're asking and can easily flag their questions, they
| can feed misleading guidance to spammers.
| xnx wrote:
| 90-95% of your searches don't require information more
| recent than September 2021?
| htrp wrote:
| bing actually uses search results as part of the llm
| context window.
|
| it solves a lot for hallicination and current event
| problems you have in chatgpt
| JohnFen wrote:
| That sounds about right for me. When I'm searching the
| web for information, only rarely does that information
| have to be newer than that.
|
| That said, I'm not a fan of using these tools for search.
| For me, anyway, they don't even come close to doing what
| I want when I'm searching the web.
| penjelly wrote:
| in my exp. bing even hallucinates the sources. I use
| chatgpt and bing side by side instead of the average
| google, then resort to google with those both fail.
|
| i find chatgpt 3.5 answers better than bing. Also ive had
| bing end conversion with me on more than one occasion
| without saying anything offensive
| rmbyrro wrote:
| No. In few cases where there is time sensitivity, it's
| not an issue.
|
| I'm using it to help me with a library integration, for
| example. I noticed it was recommending deprecated
| methods. So I copy/pasted the latest source code, asked
| it to update itself, and voila.
|
| It's super smart and learns literally in a second. Just
| drop recent information at it and ask what you need.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| How do you manage the hallucination problems, or do you
| not seem to be having them?
|
| I'm blown away by the competence of the language model
| but its willingness to make up facts makes me leary.
| caeril wrote:
| Hallucination problem is easily solved by using it as a
| code/config template or starter, and actually vetting its
| output. It's still a huge time-saver, even with the
| vetting time involved.
|
| Cold War strategy. Trust but Verify.
| qbrass wrote:
| Let the car drive itself, but do all the work of driving
| anyway so you can take the wheel when it screws up.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Is this really a problem?
|
| What could be more 2020s than a post-truth search engine?
| cruano wrote:
| > its willingness to make up facts makes me leary
|
| I see you haven't met humans
| stanac wrote:
| We can downvote human comments and proposed solution (on
| stack overflow, hn, etc...) and also I don't expect
| colleagues to lied to me when I ask them about a feature
| or how to do xyz in a language or library or framework.
|
| Bing, IIRC, has a way to provide feedback, not sure how
| useful it is for today's users and if it will be able to
| solve hallucinations one day.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I try to always give Bing+ChatGPT chat or search results
| a thumbs up or a thumbs down. I am using the service for
| free, so it seems fair for me to take a moment to provide
| feedback.
| zouhair wrote:
| Humans are actually quite reliable. Wikipedia is that
| trust manifested. Also a human liar knows they are lying,
| AI doesn't know it's saying something wrong.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| That's why we call it hallucinating rather than lying.
| Confusing the two is conceptually unhygienic.
| loandbehold wrote:
| Humans can also give wrong information without realizing
| it.
| vkou wrote:
| The average human is going to give me the wrong answer to
| a question I ask him.
|
| But I'm generally not interested in asking an _average
| human_. I 'm interested in asking someone who knows their
| butt from a hole in the ground in whichever topic I'm
| asking them about.
| CactusOnFire wrote:
| When google sends me to a website, I can at least judge
| the credibility of a website.
|
| When ChatGPT tells me something, I have no idea if it's
| paraphrasing information gathered from Encyclopedia
| Britannica, or from a hollow-earther forum.
| Kye wrote:
| Citations! I never trust Bing Chat's answer. The links
| usually quickly tell you if the answer is hallucinated.
| Basically: treat it as a search engine, not an answer
| engine. Follow the links like you would on any other
| search engine. Those links will still be more relevant.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| It happily made up citations for me. In a follow up, I
| asked it not too, and to please use only real papers. It
| apologized, said it would not do it again, then in the
| same reply made up another non-existent but plausible
| citation.
|
| Checking the links is a good practice.
|
| I feel like we just created an interesting novel problem
| in the world. Looking forward to seeing how this plays
| out.
| brookst wrote:
| Are you talking about Bing Chat, which cites actual web
| pages it used to make the summary, or ChatGPT, which is a
| very different beast and relies on built-in knowledge
| rather than searches?
| robotresearcher wrote:
| Good call. I was using ChatGPT.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Sounds like you should be doing the research yourself but
| are relying on an untrusted source to feed you answers? I
| don't think we're there yet...
| robotresearcher wrote:
| On the contrary, I was doing a calibration, asking about
| something to which I know the answers very well. To see
| if it was trustworthy.
| siquick wrote:
| Phind gives you citations and even let's you ignore
| certain sources.
|
| https://www.phind.com/
| Kye wrote:
| Not any use to me (not a developer), but it's cool there
| are niche search engines for stuff like this.
| scandox wrote:
| What I've found is that until you see it really
| hallucinate like mad on a subject you know well you don't
| realize how crazy it can be.
|
| Especially when I talk to it about fiction and ask
| questions about - for example - a specific story and you
| see it invent whole quotes and characters and so on...it
| is a masterful bullshitter.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| GPT4 got a lot better at avoiding hallucinations, in my
| anecdotal experiences. But it ain't free yet.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| 95% of what I search for, I can independently confirm
| once I have it in hand. For the other 5%, I avoid
| ChatGPT.
| vanviegen wrote:
| Reminds me of Knoll's law of media accuracy:
|
| "everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely
| true, except for the rare story of which you happen to
| have firsthand knowledge".
|
| Humans are pretty good bullshitters too!
| onlypositive wrote:
| Bing generating snippets of text from websites isn't
| going to generate hallucinations like you think it is.
| malaya_zemlya wrote:
| It totally would, if Bing doesn't return relevant
| results.
|
| I've asked BingGPT about myself and it gave me three
| answers. One was more or less on-point (it found my
| linkedin profile), and the other two were hallucinations.
| What happened was Bing found two unrelated pages and GPT
| has tried and failed to make sense of them.
|
| Either that, or I am a prince whose name means "goose" in
| Polish.
| rchaud wrote:
| Newspapers print their errata though. Does ChatGPT ever
| admit to making a mistake?
| kalmi10 wrote:
| It can pick up on inconsistencies, especially when
| pointed out, and can say it was wrong, and try to
| reconcile the information.
| vanviegen wrote:
| Errata are extremely rare. Gross misrepresentations and
| errors are not, unfortunately.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| All the time, but only when prompted. You have to have a
| conversation with it and provide more detail which
| exposes the flaws in its previous answers, then it will
| happily apologize for its mistakes. (For me, this usually
| looks like me pasting an error message that its code
| caused.)
|
| I really hope they find a way to have it apply context
| from future conversations such that when it learns the
| error of its ways it emails you a retraction, but that's
| probably a ways out because humans can't be trusted to
| not weaponize such a feature into sending spam.
| Xeamek wrote:
| But it doesn't learn its error, that's the whole problem.
| It only responds to 'accusations' from user in the most
| common way, which is 'apologies-like'.
|
| The weight of phrases like "you are wrong" is in fact so
| strong, that it fools the chatGPT to apologize for its
| 'mistakes' even in the scenarios where its text was
| obviously correct - like telling it 2+2 doesn't equal 4
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Well yeah, it's an imperfect tool, and you have to treat
| it as such. Probably there's a lot to be discovered about
| how to use it most effectively. I just don't find that
| it's more problematic than the other tools in my box.
|
| Sure, grep has never flat out lied to me the way chatGPT
| does, but it's a statistical model, not a co-worker, so I
| don't feel betrayed, I just feel... cautioned. It keeps
| you on your toes, which isn't such a bad state to be in.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Problematically, they're much better bullshitters than
| ChatGPT. And if you used Google to find them, they're
| probably either selling you something, or you had to
| navigate a minefield of people who are in order to find
| them.
| docandrew wrote:
| It's great too when you don't know exactly what to search
| for, especially for acronyms.
| [deleted]
| loandbehold wrote:
| That was a problem for ChatGPT3. Not so much for
| ChatGPT4. I also switched to ChatGPT4 for most of my
| searches. I only use Google now as a shortcut for
| navigating to specific website.
| xapata wrote:
| > leary
|
| Leary is a rare variant spelling of leery.
|
| I mention this, because you seem to care about
| correctness.
| atlantic wrote:
| Leery
| roncesvalles wrote:
| >If you had told me 3 months ago that Bing would be a
| serious threat to Google, I still would have laughed.
|
| Every day I enter a few difficult queries on both Google
| and Bing to see if Bing gives me something better. I'm
| still laughing that people think Bing is a serious threat.
| mhermher wrote:
| Maybe my queries are not difficult enough. Do you have an
| example?
| roncesvalles wrote:
| Ok here's one: "why did capote and vidal hate each other"
| anotherman554 wrote:
| Are you comparing Google to the "new A.I. powered Bing,
| only in Microsoft edge" or to the normal Bing search
| engine?
| roncesvalles wrote:
| The Bing search engine not the chatbot. Is there some v2
| Bing search engine? A quick Bing search didn't reveal
| anything about it.
| pmontra wrote:
| Maybe I'm using a different Bing because I access it
| through Duck Duck Go, but it doesn't seem better than
| Google. I often have to add a !g to technical searches
| because DDD doesn't return the right results. Google has
| them in the very first links. I'll try to use Bing
| directly.
| amluto wrote:
| Google has spent the last 10 years ago making Google worse.
| They achieved this in large part by making the whole
| Internet worse [0], but a search engine with results of the
| quality of Google 10 years ago would be a serious
| competitor.
|
| [0] For example, Google used to have a fairly strictly
| enforced rule that indexable content had to actually be
| visible to an unauthenticated user. The current crop of
| sites that have apparently useful content in snippets but
| that hide it when loaded would have been penalized,
| possibly severely.
| all2 wrote:
| I've been using DDG and Brave for a few years now, and I
| went back to Google yesterday because its the default for
| Chrome on my phone. I was startled at the difference in
| quality, especially with Brave vs Google. Brave typically
| prefers long-form writing and the quality of the articles
| is typically a lot higher than what I found using Google.
| slig wrote:
| Brave Search is like Google from 2005/6.
| catskull wrote:
| this comment got me to switch from google, thanks
| lerchmo wrote:
| They really have a flywheel of internet destruction. The
| fact that they own the entire display advertising
| business + search and ping pong people from a 50% paid
| search listing to a CPM arbitrage SEO website and back is
| just gross.
| prox wrote:
| It's almost if there is a downside to treating your users
| like shit. Google is such a weird company.
| ehvatum wrote:
| It's an advertising company. Their destiny is to reach
| parity with Clear Channel Communications in terms of
| ethics and quality.
| narrator wrote:
| After 2016, Google went on a crusade to save the universe
| by stamping out all misinformation and seems to have
| highly deranked all forums and blogs in favor of
| mainstream sites. This has made Google unusable for any
| political or controversial subject matter. This has also
| made their LLM efforts too cautious as they can't handle
| the political controversy of an LLM and can't verify that
| it will never return anything that offends anyone.
|
| It does seem like Larry and Sergei are finally back
| trying to fix the excessively politically sensitive and
| overly cautious culture. Larry, having disappeared to
| Fiji for several years, must have been pretty bored or
| annoyed with running it.
| UberFly wrote:
| They really feel like they've reached a 'Microsoft of the
| late 90s' phase.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| I'm afraid we're not there yet.
| TheKarateKid wrote:
| While I have many reasons that Google made the Internet
| worse (AMP, censoring search, forcing localized search
| results, privacy, etc.) I don't think the hidden content
| is their fault but rather that of publishers.
|
| Publishers blamed Google for declining revenue since they
| had to make their content openly accessible and therefore
| free in order to be visible to users on search. The EU
| tried to make Facebook and Google pay publishers to
| account for this. I think allowing paywalled content was
| a compromise to prevent this legislation from passing.
|
| That being said, I agree with the publishers especially
| since hypocritically Google and Facebook strictly don't
| allow scraping of their services and litigate those who
| do.
|
| Google could easily fix this by putting a symbol or label
| on paywall-related content so you know not to click it.
| tough wrote:
| Well that and a 10B investment right?
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| People are acting like Bing has created some big market
| success and Samsung is running to them because the tech is
| better. But the alternative explanation is simple: vendors
| are always looking for reasons to (threaten to) put
| mediocre non-Google search as default on their products, so
| they can extract more money from search engine providers.
| Samsung sees the current hype around Bing/Google/AI as a
| convenient negotiating point, since the media will portray
| this as "Samsung switches to awesome AI search" rather than
| "Samsung forces its users to use crummy Bing."
| brookst wrote:
| Your tone subs like you're contradicting a point, but
| your actual comment is completely in like with the idea
| that Google has been caught by surprise that Bing is good
| enough (as measured by market sentiment) to be a credible
| threat.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| I think the problem is Google is also pretty crummy. Ai
| is in a golden age without poisoned data right now. But
| wait until Bing gets popular and blackhat seo types start
| poisoning chatgpt. It will stop being useful, and I
| suspect in a way that will be unfixable since these
| language models are so hard to wrangle.
| sho_hn wrote:
| There's another side to that medal: At the moment nobody
| takes any issue with OpenAI doing filtering and curation
| in deciding what is part of their training data set,
| aside from perhaps the anti-bias crowd. "AI neutrality"
| is not yet a topic. Yet.
| init2null wrote:
| I've already seen that several times with image
| generation. Most recently was an article commenting on
| how the American smile was polluting generated photos.
| People can't decide what they want. Do they want
| licensed, curated commercial photos in the database or do
| they want search engine style neutrality? You really
| can't have both.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Musk was on the air this week talking about how the
| current AI is biased on the left as he promotes his new
| AI company
| smackeyacky wrote:
| Lets laugh and watch him make the "truth social" of AI,
| hopefully setting fire to another few billion in the
| process.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| It's always nice to hear Mr. Musk has not given up his
| cannabis habit.
| xapata wrote:
| > without poisoned data right now
|
| It already seems poisoned to me. It's popularity over
| correctness, because LLMs don't know semantics.
| AJ007 wrote:
| The users who pay attention to search quality aren't
| impacted by the default search option. They will just go
| back to Google or whatever alternative they wish.
|
| The users who the default engine really locks in are the
| ones who just mostly click ads and have no idea they are
| ads. When they use Google they are mostly clicking ads
| anyways, so the search result quality will appear about
| the same with Bing. Maybe even better if there are fewer
| ads.
|
| For Microsoft, getting more users on board means higher
| ad volume which brings more advertisers who are going to
| spend the time to manage Bing ad campaigns. You can bet
| they've done the calculations for how much money they can
| spend at what price. Ultimately that leads to higher
| monetization and then Microsoft can pay other companies
| (like Apple) to switch the default engine.
|
| Google is a multi-trillion dollar attention tax that just
| sucks money from the global economy. They've been wildly
| mismanaged since Eric Schmidt's CEO tenure ended. It's
| been a long time coming, but the timer is running out of
| sand for Google fast. The revenue may take a long time to
| peak and decline but when they start missing their
| quarterly earnings it will be a bloodbath for Google's
| employees.
| warner25 wrote:
| I think we still have a _long_ way to go before people are
| actually saying "Bing it." Then it's a serious threat.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| I have a friend who started saying "let me just bing that"
| to get people to laugh. Now I've started saying it at
| work... originally for a laugh, but I find I'm using DDG
| and Bing more often than Google now. (Alas how I miss
| AltaVista) So it may be sooner than you think. I mean... my
| data set is only two people, so maybe it will only be 2
| hours sooner than you think.
| criddell wrote:
| I suspect some people google for things on Bing.
| Ageodene wrote:
| Man I haven't used Google in 10 years yet I still say I
| "Googled it." It's just a saying at this point, not an
| endorsement.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Or that someday Apple would be the most valuable company in
| the world
| [deleted]
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| Even though I have invested heavily in Apple's sandbox world,
| I am very impressed by ChromeOS and inexpensive Chromebooks
| by 3rd parties. I have close to the cost of a car invested in
| Apple gear, yet, if I had to I could do all of my writing and
| coding on the very inexpensive Lenovo Duet Chromebook I
| bought a year ago. The Linux container support is OK, and I
| usually use remote servers anyway.
|
| For search, Bing + ChatGPT is now my driver for search. I
| still use Google and Duck Duck Go occasionally, but usually I
| am OK with waiting a short while for Bing + ChatGPT results.
| kagevf wrote:
| > I usually use remote servers anyway
|
| Sorry for the OT question - do you use slime-tramp? And if
| so, do you have a way to use M-. (slime-edit-definition)
| without having to re-compile files using the remote paths?
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I usually use Mosh (instead of SSH) and have a nice Emacs
| setup on remote servers. If I am using an iPad Pro
| instead of a laptop, I have Emacs on remote servers
| configured with Mosh to accept virtual mouse clicks (by
| tapping the iPad screen) to jump around source files and
| scrolling with screen gestures. This might seem awkward,
| but it is not.
|
| For Common Lisp, running Emacs on a remote server instead
| of slime-tramp has always been good enough. Would you
| suggest I try slime-tramp?
| kagevf wrote:
| > I usually use Mosh
|
| Mosh as in "mobile shell"? https://mosh.org/
|
| > Would you suggest I try slime-tramp?
|
| I don't know yet, I've just started trying it out.
|
| What made me want to try it was that I could use GUI
| Emacs to connect to emacs running on a different machine
| and still have full access to all the emacs keybindings.
|
| So far, the downsides that I have encountered are that
| M-. and C-c C-k (slime-compile-and-load-file) don't quite
| work. The work-around would be to visit each file using
| the remote path and re-compile them so that the running
| Lisp image can map what's in the image to a path tramp
| recognizes. Then M-. and C-c C-k should work.
|
| To recompile, select all then compile (X-c X-p C-c C-c)
| works, or I think C-c M-k also works. Not a great
| solution if there are a lot of files, though.
|
| IIUC the problem boils down to M-. eventually calling
| (xref-find-definitions) which is an emacs built-in, and I
| think that's why the tramp paths aren't translating until
| a re-compile is done.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| They used to ship a Google Drive app for Windows that adds it
| to Explorer similar to OneDrive. They killed it, as with
| everything else.
|
| Edit: I'm wrong!
| kvn8888 wrote:
| No, backup and sync was rebranded to Google drive for
| windows
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Very well, I stand corrected.
| esprehn wrote:
| I can't tell if your sarcasm is top notch, but isn't
| Chromebooks and GSuite (docs, sheets, slides) exactly the thing
| you describe?
| dheera wrote:
| That's a stripped down OS running only a web browser and a
| bunch of webapps, not a real OS. Another one of those Google
| fantasies that failed to understand normal people.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| That might have been true years ago. It's currently leagues
| ahead of any other OS outside of Windows and Mac. It's
| still limited and quirky, but pretty much covers the basic
| needs of "normal" people.
| rcme wrote:
| > It's currently leagues ahead of any other OS outside of
| Windows and Mac.
|
| Is ChromeOS really leagues ahead of Linux on the desktop?
| And other than Linux, how many other desktop OSes are
| there?
| makeitdouble wrote:
| It heavily depends on what you do on linux, if you
| completely customized it to perfecfly fit your needs and
| only work with a stable set of programs, ChromeOS doesn't
| stand a chance.
|
| For more "standard" users though, ChromeOS is very
| simple, has excelent touch support, battery management, a
| half baked but functional tablet mode, covers a lot of
| its ecosystem issues with the android subsytem, is fast
| to learn yet gives access to more power user features
| (including linux VMs). And it's of course very forgiving,
| as every regular apps are sandboxed. In that respect I
| see it succeeding where linux has been struggling for so
| long. TBH I was hoping Google made a decent iPad pro
| competitor based on ChromeOS, but I'm not holding my
| breath.
|
| It's of course not perfect, far from it, but it's a
| pretty good computer experience IMHO. Linux has
| progressed a lot, but I still don't see the simplicity,
| versatility and forgiveness trio in a linux machine
| anytime soon.
|
| On the other OSes, I didn't see it as desktop only, and
| iOS could have been a nice alternative, if Apple could
| have bothered (same for android and DEX). I actually
| think ChromeOS is a better choice than windows for light
| computer users, assuming Google doesn't throw the towel..
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| What do you think Joe Sixpack runs on his computer these
| days? There are tons of people out there who do nothing but
| browse websites and use the "apps" as provided on those
| sites. They have no use for native Windows apps nor all the
| extra baggage that comes with it.
| bflesch wrote:
| That's a stupid over-generalization. There's always one
| shitty app you need for some weird use case which is not
| in the official stores. And to rule that out 100% by
| purchasing a chromebook is a hassle people don't want to
| worry about.
| warner25 wrote:
| Yeah, most people _shouldn 't_ need more, but you're
| right. For example, to update the maps in our minivan's
| navigation system, I need to install some (crappy)
| Windows-only desktop application, "Garmin Express."
| [deleted]
| ajmurmann wrote:
| I wonder if it's more the fear of needing a desktop app
| one day again that you haven't started in years than the
| actual need for desktop apps.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| Besides gaming people, I know very few people who need
| more. And gaming with webgl goes pretty far too. I think it
| works quite well; I don't like it, or rather, actually hate
| it; I like optimal software against the hardware, but that
| is such a niche now. So just running everything in a
| browser is simply realistic and enough for most of the
| population. I think it sells quite well as well. I have a
| Chromebook which was cheap but it works very well. With
| GitHub spaces I am not sure if I will go back for many of
| the stuff I do; if I drop a pot of tea on it, it's a short
| trip to the shop to get a new one and I will be back to
| work 30 min later.
|
| Android and iOS work like that too of course. So maybe they
| should just switch to something like Dex instead as now you
| can run android apps in chromeos, so what's the difference?
|
| Windows is hopelessly overkill for most people.
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| Even gen-z still build their own PCs. It isn't as niche
| as often said. They would laugh in your face with the
| worst insults a 16 year old teenager can come up with if
| you offer them a chromebook. They would sell it to their
| wine-aunt (who happens to not run non-emulator windows
| emulators on Linux).
|
| Sure, they also play Pokemon Go... although partially
| because they are not sitting in front of their PCs. Large
| market by volume, but more so for alternative situations.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| Based. The kids are all right.
| warner25 wrote:
| This is interesting insight. So Chromebooks aren't cool?
| I guess I can see that when every school is issuing
| Chromebooks to the kids these days. I remember Mac
| computers being uncool when I was a kid because that's
| what we had in the school computer lab in the 1990s, and
| they were locked down enough that it wasn't easy to do
| fun things on them.
|
| "Wine-aunt" is new to me too, and funny (after looking up
| what it means).
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| ChromeOS has for years supported a full linux shell in a
| chroot, with full X support. And even before that, it
| supported quite a bit through android apps. Your
| information is about ten years out of date.
| KyeRussell wrote:
| Tell that to the scores of kids that have come up not
| understanding a filesystem because they just...haven't
| needed to, in large part because they grew up using
| Chromebooks, happily.
|
| Stop conflating yourself with a "normal person". It's quite
| clear from your comment that you're anything but.
| wslh wrote:
| If Microsoft's 48-year history has shown anything, it is that
| they can produce subpar products, experience numerous failures,
| make poor investments and acquisitions, and even ruin products
| (e.g., Skype), yet they remain resilient and successful!
|
| As for Google, I am uncertain whether they were prepared for
| this competition because, firstly, the business terms offered
| by Microsoft might have been quite strategic, and secondly, the
| Google search engine has not experienced significant innovation
| or improvement since PageRank, at least from a user experience
| perspective rather than complexity. I will regale my
| descendants with stories of a time when I searched for
| something and found at least one relevant result among the top
| 20.
| brokencode wrote:
| That to me is the big difference between Google and
| Microsoft. Microsoft is willing to slowly build on something
| for years before it goes anywhere. They maintain their
| products for incredible amounts of time, such as how IE11 was
| only killed off like a decade after its release.
|
| Google on the other hand is always chasing the next big
| thing. It just doesn't have the institutional attention span
| to do anything really big. If a project isn't an explosive
| hit right away, Google moves on to the next big idea.
| hintymad wrote:
| > They should have tried to make a better desktop OS
|
| Wouldn't office suite be a better target? Everyone uses it.
| Lots of low hanging fruits. Easy to win the heart of geeks.
| Ample opportunities to integrate with other enterprise
| services.
| qikInNdOutReply wrote:
| Somewhere some shareholders are whispering to stage a culture
| revolution in the G.
| delfinom wrote:
| >They should have tried to make a better desktop OS (just buy
| Canonical or something)
|
| Ah yes, Canonical, land of people attempting to fork the Linux
| ecosystem and getting shot down by everyone and doubling down.
|
| Would be a perfect fit for Google.
| taylodl wrote:
| Google's whole _raison d 'etre_ was internet computing -
| computing at scales never before seen. Think "BigFiles" and the
| original Google search. They were able to leverage that
| technology in creating AdSense, which is their huge money-
| maker. Google's challenge has been finding ways to monetize
| their internet compute technologies. But now that it's 25 years
| later and more and more people have internet-scale computing
| available to them it appears Google is losing their edge. What
| used to be their "special sauce" has now become a commodity.
| It's a story as old as business.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Why hasn't Canonical been acquired yet?
| asddubs wrote:
| maybe shuttleworth is not interested in selling?
| SecretDreams wrote:
| Have people used BING lately? It's still not good - but maybe
| it will improve.
|
| Google search has just gotten worse and is more ad prone. It's
| still better, but not golden age google - not even close.
| [deleted]
| pmlnr wrote:
| >One of the reasons for Google getting so good early on was
| that they had oodles of usage data to test and improve their
| search functionality forming a positive feedback loop
|
| ???
|
| PageRank. It was PageRank, and the fact that they didn't rely
| on the lies put into <meta> tags. There was no feedback loop at
| that point.
| collaborative wrote:
| I created AISearch.vip but honestly I am now going to open
| source it and make it a locally run stand-alone AI search
| engine because it's absurd having to call OpenAI APIs in the
| backend when I can let the user run it with their own API keys
|
| There's no moat in anything AI, but MS gets OpenAI access at a
| discount and therefore will win
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > I always thought that Google made a big blunder by not
| encroaching upon Microsoft's turf more aggressively.
|
| I've always been shocked that Google didn't face antitrust
| action over using their internet video monopoly to kill Windows
| Phone. They wouldn't create a Youtube app for Windows Phone,
| nor would they allow Microsoft to create one themselves.
| JustLurking2022 wrote:
| I had a Windows phone and android simultaneously - I actually
| liked the UI on the windows phone but I think I may have been
| the only person on earth that did because I virtually never
| saw another one. From that perspective, I can understand
| choosing not to build for the platform.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| I can understand not wanting to build an app yourself, but
| when you hold a monopoly on internet video and you won't
| allow your platform competitors to build an app on their
| own dime, that really should have triggered antitrust
| action.
|
| I can remember Google taking similar actions to lock out
| Amazon's Echo Show.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/26/16371292/google-
| youtube-a...
|
| If anything, Google has been too aggressive.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > They should have tried to make a better desktop OS
|
| Desktop OS's are not the long term future of computing, is it?
| But they were astute in acquiring Android. Meanwhile, Microsoft
| thought that a mobile OS is just a desktop OS squished onto a
| smaller screen.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Is Google paying Android phone manufacturers for having Google as
| default search engine similar how they are paying Apple?
| eclipsetheworld wrote:
| This article seems a little hyperbolic since I assume the default
| search engine will simply be the highest bidder...
| bfrog wrote:
| Too busy asking people to invert binary trees and not looking for
| people that know how to make products that make money.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Actually if you have been really looking at Google's
| management, just the opposite has happened.
|
| Eric Schmidt, who is an exceptionally rare talent understanding
| engineering, business and politics at the same time was changed
| to a person who just want to show more ads (the product that
| makes money) with 0 engineering background.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| I think you're both right. Change comes from above and
| reflects from below. "We hire the best" has become "we hire
| the best at passing a generic set of tests" because they want
| hiring to be a thoughtless, automated process.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| I have been there and seen the destruction (all meetings
| were about political correctness, we weren't able to
| discuss anything that was really important).
|
| The best are / were there before they quit to create
| companies, like OpenAI because it was easier than changing
| management.
|
| Also I bet Sam Altman would be able to reverse a binary
| tree (it's a trivial recursion) even if he was never at
| Google: it's just part of being a professional programmer.
| thisarticle wrote:
| And it's disgusting, the amount of ads on YouTube now is
| gross. I recently wasn't logged in and saw how many ads I had
| to watch to see a minute long video. I wouldn't use the
| service if it wasn't for YouTube Premium.
| 0xDEF wrote:
| To train and productionize large-scale AI you need people who
| are good at algorithms and data structures.
| devnullbrain wrote:
| This is a very Samsung move: making their premium product feel
| cheap and cynical to users for easy money.
| tomcam wrote:
| A gentle reminder that there is no proof of the "Google in shock"
| assertion. The fact that an anonymous source maybe claimed it to
| someone at the New York Times has essentially zero credibility.
|
| Until an attributed source at Google says something like "we were
| shocked" or "we were gobsmacked, etc." that's all just third-hand
| information reported fourth-hand.
| anonkogudhyfhhf wrote:
| Good. Samsung is removing that blogspam of a search
| ivanmontillam wrote:
| I think that Search Engine Optimization as we know it is also
| going to change forever as well.
|
| Don't be surprised if we start seeing ads like "If you don't
| appear in Bing/GPT, you don't exist;" we are now in the era of
| AI-based Search Engine Optimization, or whatever term you want to
| put it on.
|
| The end result is that the BigAI must know about you and talk
| about you. You must position yourself in the mind of ChatGPT or
| similar.
|
| EDIT: How about "Prompt Search Term Optimization" (PSTO)?
| thexumaker wrote:
| lol I'm officially moving off of samsung if this happens. No way
| in hell I'm using a shitty bing browser
| dathinab wrote:
| Soon we have a Microsoft more power full then ever but less
| controlled and constrained by anti monopoly regulation then ever.
|
| - after google search degraded for a while bing is competive
|
| - MS has much influence and stack in (not really open) OpenAI
|
| - MS has with LinkedLn a relevant social network, sure it's work
| focused but increasingly used for non work usecases
|
| - MS controls 2 of the 6 relevant gaming platforms (XBox, PC --
| the others are Switch, Playstation, iOS and Android), they happen
| to also be 2 of the 3 AAA gaming platforms (XBox, PC -- the other
| is Playstation)
|
| - MS owns a lot of game production
|
| - MS has the go to email solution for companies Outlook as part
| of Office365
|
| - MS has what some call the best Calendar/schedule Meeting app,
| also part of Office365
|
| - MS has the go to online meeting platform for companies (teams
| as part of Office365, through it succks)
|
| - MS has a competitive company chatting platform
|
| - MS competes with Google and Apple in the Cloud
|
| - MS has a not so competitive ad platform
|
| - MS has a semi competitive voice assistant which if integrated
| with ChatGPT tech could very well become very competitive very
| fast
|
| - MS doesn't have a phone OS, but a lot control over phone
| through MDM features integrated into teams/outlook etc.
|
| - MS has one of the main browsers (edge) with a lot of people
| happily explicitly opting for it or being coerced or tricked into
| using it (they lost that in the past but regained it). While it
| pains me its likely more relevant then Firefox by now.
|
| - MS sells PC/Laptop like hardware successfully, but not that
| competitive
|
| - one of the best standard consumer ergonomic keyboards is from
| MS
|
| - they still have one of the most widely used presentation and
| note taking applications
|
| - their database system is still around and sells, not sure why
|
| - they control both of the some of the most widely used IDEs (VS
| and VSCode)
|
| - they have some experience with AR/VR through I'm not sure about
| the competitiveness of current products from them
|
| - they made some of the main reasons why people tried out Linux
| go away by having WSL
|
| - .... I most likely forgot a lot
|
| I.e. all in all: MS is EVERYWHERE with constant faster growing
| power and control all through the tech space. If it keeps up that
| way MS will soon be both more powerful then Google and then it
| ever have been. If they had managed to properly land their phone
| OS things would be really scary now.
| machiaweliczny wrote:
| Yes, you forgot github, typescript and NPM. They acquired most
| popular dev platform along with code editor, watch what you do
| and will automate that.
| michaelt wrote:
| Some would consider the fact that Microsoft "competes with
| Google and Apple in the Cloud" and "has a not so competitive ad
| platform" and "has a semi competitive voice assistant" and so
| on is evidence they _don 't_ have a monopoly, rather than
| evidence they _do_.
| dathinab wrote:
| they don't have a monopoloy but they are not far away from
| having more power then when they had a quasi monopoly
|
| the mono in monopoly is in the end irrelevant, what matters
| is the power and ways you can abuse it. In the past you
| mainly got that with being a monopoly or duopoly but by now
| you can archive it by being "just" competitive with the best
| in a sector, and doing so in docent of areas and slowly
| integrating all of that into each other
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Microsoft's effort to corner the developer productivity
| software market has surprised me with how successful it's been.
| Github has solid vscode integration, WSL works well enough,
| copilot is seeing use. They've really solidified themselves as
| the enterprise productivity software company for all stacks
| other than creative which adobe still dominates. Wonder if they
| plan to expand there next?
| Nephx wrote:
| And they've invested billions into the development-scene,
| especially lately. Noteworthy;
|
| - Github with its new Copilot API to multiple IDE's (incl.
| third party)
|
| - Typescript and standards management
|
| - NPM, locking into the entire web2 ecosystem
| tough wrote:
| Oh damn, NPM too?
|
| lol. MS owns my ass and I can't even do shit about it
| ChatGTP wrote:
| Soon you will be owned by Clippy, and the way it's going,
| you will become a paper clip. No joke.
| tough wrote:
| From my list of my daily usage offenders which also include VS
| Code, you forgot Github and TypeScript I think.
| throw84249948 wrote:
| - MS complies with Chinese laws so they operate in China.
| That's a huge population Google is missing out on. If other
| countries start to enact similar laws, MS would eagerly comply
| to get into that market.
| shever73 wrote:
| This is hardly surprising. I never normally use Google, but was
| asked to check some SEO using Google search the other day. The
| results were a dumpster fire of sponsored content, "other people
| also search for" and stuff that was largely irrelevant. I had to
| go onto the second and third pages to find anything even remotely
| close to what I wanted.
| zdragnar wrote:
| It must depend heavily on what you are searching for. There are
| a lot of things I dislike about Google, but their search
| results are consistently better than Bing in my experience.
| electrosphere wrote:
| Shame not DuckDuckGo.
| hardware2win wrote:
| DDG uses Bing under the hood
| Nicksil wrote:
| >DDG uses Bing under the hood
|
| Bing is just one of many sources DuckDuckGo utilizes
|
| https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-
| pages/results/so...
| [deleted]
| ghastmaster wrote:
| > When people search, we believe they're really looking for
| answers, as opposed to just links
|
| I believe this as well for most people and most searches.
| I, however, am not most people. The vast majority of the
| time I want a link to sites that have what I am looking
| for. This is my biggest gripe with search engines and has
| been for a very long time. I used to be really good at
| finding pages I wanted by punching in the right words in
| the search. At some point in the mid 00's Google changed
| everything and I have failed to adapt fully.
| ksec wrote:
| This is basically Samsung asking Google to pay up. Google needs
| to pay Apple / iOS for Default Search Engine, _and_ paying
| Samsung for staying on Android with Google Search.
|
| Basically Google is being squeezed left and right. So the only
| way to increase revenue or profits to satisfy the money they
| spend on Apple and Samsung? More Ads on Youtube and Google
| Search. The more Ads they serve, the worse UX they have. All
| while completely fail to compete against AWS or Azure.
| Twirrim wrote:
| When I saw the title it reminded me of the 20+ years we'd see
| almost bi-annual news articles about how Dell was considering
| adding AMD chips to their line-up.
|
| They'd do that, Intel would offer them a discount, and that'd
| be the last we'd hear of it for a year or so, until that
| discount would be expiring.
| slimginz wrote:
| IIRC someone at Intel once said that Dell is the "best friend
| money can buy" in an internal email that came out when Intel
| was being investigated for anti-competitive practices.
| jrockway wrote:
| Is GCP really a failure? I think the product is OK and they
| seem to have some big customers. They're maybe #3 in the space,
| but you can make a lot of money without being #1.
|
| Yes, we all hate their support structure (it goes through
| SADA), but the price is right. At my last company with 4
| engineers we were paying AWS ~$1000/month for support. At my
| current company back when we had a cloud service on GCP, we got
| weekly calls with support for $0/month. Folks at Google also
| seemed to approve my weird resource requests (tons of GPUs in
| the midst of a GPU shortage, etc.) without me going through any
| back channels. I didn't find it terrible to work with at all,
| and it was much cheaper than AWS.
| foobiekr wrote:
| I am curious why you find it cheaper than AWS. Are you sure
| the application didn't change and was at the same scale?
|
| In my experience, GCP and AWS are within a tiny % of each
| other.
| somsak2 wrote:
| I'd call being half of Azure's market share today a failure.
| Hell, they were better-positioned than Amazon to offer an
| AWS-like product when AWS itself came out.
| JustLurking2022 wrote:
| Honestly, with any vendor not named AWS, it's incredibly
| difficult to parse their actual "cloud" revenue. I believe
| Microsoft bundles in their Office 365 revenue just as
| Google does Docs. IBM stuffs in all sorts of seemingly
| unrelated stuff to make their numbers sound bigger. It's
| actually difficult to compare apples-to-apples because of
| all the gamesmanship.
| seydor wrote:
| google still owns android
| pulse7 wrote:
| True, but Android is open-source and suppliers can replace
| default search engine - and other services - on it...
| Zigurd wrote:
| More precisely, Google makes AOSP, which is the basis for a
| licensed version of Android that includes a number of
| proprietary apps.
|
| Two things are not likely to happen:
|
| 1. Samsung will not give up on licensing Google proprietary
| package of apps.
|
| 2. Google will not yank Samsung's license.
|
| Google _will_ absolutely tighten the screws on their future
| contracts to discourage these deals, as well as sweeping out
| crappy "customizations."
| 0zemp1c wrote:
| > as well as sweeping out crappy "customizations."
|
| huh? Samsung OneUI features have been making their way into
| mainstream AOSP...particularly the tablet-focused stuff
|
| there is no way Google will ever try to "strong arm"
| Samsung...Samsung _is_ the Android market, the Pixel line
| is a rounding error and in no way a competitive threat
| Andrex wrote:
| > there is no way Google will ever try to "strong arm"
| Samsung...Samsung is the Android market, the Pixel line
| is a rounding error and in no way a competitive threat
|
| They've been strong-arming every Android OEM since the
| start (Google Mobile Services agreement). ("Strong
| arming" being closer to Apple exerting control vs. the
| wild west of pre-2007 cellphones.)
|
| It's finally starting to bear fruit with things like
| Project Mainline and Project Treble, but the political
| winds have changed and I expect various Gov'ts to claw
| back the control Google has on OEMs over the next decade.
| Whether Google can continue their efforts to ensure a
| stable Android platform is an open question after that.
|
| I can't point to anything specific since I'm rushing this
| comment, but it should be fairly obvious that Google lets
| OEMs do things their own way until the dust settles and
| Google synthesizes the different approaches into the
| "official" AOSP way.
|
| I'm not sure any actual code from OneUI has made it into
| Android, that would surprise me. Google really likes
| doing things "their way" in Android. The Android team
| takes UI inspiration from everyone, but most of their
| eyeball time is on Apple.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Hmm...
|
| >40% of Samsung's net revenue is mobile devices.
|
| Only ~56% of Google's revenue is from Search ads - <50%
| of that comes from Android - and <35% of that comes from
| Samsung.
|
| <10% of Google's total revenue comes from Samsung devices
| >40% of Samsung's NET REVENUE comes from selling Android
| devices.
|
| It's almost as if Samsung is a lot more dependent on
| Google than the other way around.
|
| At the end of the day - the majority of people you
| default to Bing search are going to switch back to
| Google. Samsung will be lucky to get a meaningful amount
| of money.
|
| MSFT can't outbid Google because they can't make as much
| money from the searches as Google.
| 0zemp1c wrote:
| > It's almost as if Samsung is a lot more dependent on
| Google than the other way around.
|
| in a pinch, Samsung could just fork the AOSP project and
| continue forward without Google, it would be trivial for
| app makers to re-publish their apps in a Samsung app
| store (and many already do)
| Zigurd wrote:
| Someone in Microsoft is going to deserve a huge bonus if
| they can talk Samsung into making a successor to Surface
| Duo.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Except they tried this several times, and it hasn't
| worked.
| dougmwne wrote:
| An extremely second rate phone platform compared to iOS where
| the customers don't spend nearly as much money and they have
| minimal control over their hardware partners.
| adithyassekhar wrote:
| Then linux should be a second rate platform since no one
| spend enough money and there is zero control over what it
| runs on.
|
| Android is also technically more advanced than anything
| Apple in pure versatility and user control. Apple execs
| might get nightmares if someone suggested giving more
| control to their user. I can stay in the walled garden or
| play outside with naughty apps and emulators. Android's
| safety model is not based on restricting what the user can
| do. Security by obscurity is the least one can do.
|
| I understand everyone has a phone choice and some people
| prefer their phone less sophisticated or less feature rich
| or more basic.
|
| But just because you prefer something so reduced in
| functionality that it's a waste of the incredible silicon
| powering it does not mean you can belittle something far
| more capable. Especially in a developer oriented website.
| seydor wrote:
| .. which owns 80% of the market. Maybe iOS users spend more
| on hardware & apps but everyone spends money online
| shopping
| balls187 wrote:
| It does, and funny enough that Antitrust lawsuit against MSFT
| bundling IE in Windows may end up helping them here.
| gspencley wrote:
| Most of Android is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. So
| while the word "owns" is true in a technical legal sense,
| there is nothing to prevent anyone from forking it and doing
| their own thing. Unlike with GPL code, they don't even need
| to license their changes under the same license as long as
| they abide the terms with respects to the original.
|
| Personally I use GrapheneOS in order to "de-Google" without
| switching to the Apple ecosystem. No Google Play (you can
| install it but I choose not to), FOSS apps only. I don't
| recommend it for everyone but it made me not hate owning a
| smart phone for the first time since the "mobile revolution"
| passed my old grumpy self by.
| qwertox wrote:
| > Personally I use GrapheneOS in order to "de-Google"
| without switching to the Apple ecosystem. No Google Play
| (you can install it but I choose not to), FOSS apps only.
|
| This is only valid for power users. Normal users would
| probably never accept a phone without Google Play Services
| running on it, with Amazon's devices being the exception
| (and don't ask me why, because I don't get it.)
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| > Amazon's devices being the exception (and don't ask me
| why, because I don't get it.)
|
| IMO, narrow use cases and cheapness.
|
| My impression is people buy a Fire Tablet because:
|
| * They want to read/browse the web/use a few basic social
| media apps
|
| * They want something for their kid
|
| Fire Tablets are never a primary device, so it's okay to
| have trade-offs.
| turndown wrote:
| Of course this is true, that is why it's a real threat
| when a company like Samsung, with the resources and money
| to make these things convenient/unnoticeable to normal
| users is a real problem to Google
| muyuu wrote:
| I've been looking at it. Ironically, you needed a Google
| Pixel to run it last I checked, right?
| gspencley wrote:
| Yes that is ironic. As someone else said, Google made the
| best de-Google-able phone. But from what I gather they
| chose it because of the specific hardware features and
| they need to restrict what they support to keep the
| project manageable and maintainable.
|
| I bought mine outright and wiped the Pixel version of
| Android and am pretty happy. To be clear, I wasn't trying
| to avoid giving Google money ... I just wanted a phone
| and operating system that I felt like I had control of,
| without having a ton of bloatware and spyware pre-
| installed by the vendor etc.
| zirgs wrote:
| Yup - Google made the best de-googleable phone.
| dexterdog wrote:
| They did and I bought a used pixel6 just to switch to
| graphene. The problem is that the next pixel will likely
| be much more difficult to do this with because google is
| going to not not be evil.
| mikem170 wrote:
| > you needed a Google Pixel to run it
|
| That's correct. It's my understanding that this is for
| two reasons:
|
| 1) google opened api/support for verified boot on the
| pixels (so you can tell if a border agent hacked your
| grapheneos phone, for example)
|
| 2) it's easier to support fewer phone models (given they
| are not a large team)
|
| I bought a refurbished pixel 3a last year for a little
| over $100 and have been thrilled with my grapheneos
| experience. I don't run google play, but it is my
| understanding this can be done in a sandbox (allowing for
| more privacy than usual).
| 8jef wrote:
| And a recent one that is. Almost as funny as having to
| buy a macbook to run linux.....
| DANmode wrote:
| I trust Google's incentives to have secure hardware as
| much as I trust them to have disrespectful software
| (privacy).
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > Personally I use GrapheneOS in order to "de-Google"
| without switching to the Apple ecosystem.
|
| GrapheneOS only supports Google devices like the Pixel
| though. It's the only reason I'm considering buying one.
| KyeRussell wrote:
| This doesn't change anything about the comment that you're
| replying to.
| gspencley wrote:
| Really?! You mean that my offering additional information
| and context didn't magically alter the very nature of
| time itself, thus causing the characters that they typed
| to change representation in Hacker News' database? You
| don't say! (do I need a /s indicator?)
|
| And what value, exactly, does _your_ comment add to the
| conversation?
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| It seems like it does.
|
| > paying Samsung for staying on Android with Google
| Search
|
| > google still owns android
|
| > Personally I use GrapheneOS in order to "de-Google"
|
| It doesn't matter that Google owns Android if Samsung can
| make their own fork of Android that doesn't use Google
| stuff by default. Is there something that would prevent
| Samsung from creating their own app store?
| ewoodrich wrote:
| Samsung already has their own app store (Galaxy Store)
| alongside the Play Store. Have only used it personally to
| download/update Samsung specific apps however.
| usrusr wrote:
| Look how well Huawei smartphones are selling in the west
| (not well at all). And that's not because of lack of
| trying, I've been on a team where everybody agreed that
| supporting their phones had zero upside outside of the cash
| Huawei offered for a port of our apps. And we did it, only
| because they paid so much. And those were laughably
| unattractive apps (think yellow pages), I can't even start
| to imagine what they must have spent in other directions.
| Andrex wrote:
| Huawei was selling well in the west until the US Gov't
| blocked them.
|
| https://www.economist.com/business/2022/10/25/ren-
| zhengfei-h...
| wlesieutre wrote:
| Because they used to have Google's play store and other
| services. Parent commenter's point is that a manufacturer
| having the open source parts of Android isn't necessarily
| worth much on its own.
| somsak2 wrote:
| https://archive.is/YGPFT
| sebstefan wrote:
| What could they possibly do with that that doesn't violate an
| anti-trust law?
| balls187 wrote:
| I'd bet Microsoft will gladly match all of Google's offers
| here.
| tyingq wrote:
| Probably, though taking the lower offer from Google means no
| change for end users, and thus probably less risk for
| Samsung.
| ehsankia wrote:
| Why? Google makes a shit ton of money from Search, Microsoft
| doesn't.
|
| The whole Bing AI stuff is already a huge money sink for
| them, how much can they afford to throw into this pit before
| investors start being worried?
| [deleted]
| alphabetting wrote:
| Just the payment to Apple would be significantly more than
| their 2022 search revenue. I wouldn't be shocked but it would
| be a pretty big gamble.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| The gamble didn't work out well the last time someone tried
| it, which was Yahoo buying the default search on Firefox.
| mattnewton wrote:
| That's more because it was a bet on the wrong horse. If
| you know how to install Firefox you probably know what
| search engine you are using and how to switch the default
| search engine.
| h4ch1 wrote:
| Isn't installing Firefox the same as installing any other
| browser?
| dhruvarora013 wrote:
| It's not the default browser on most devices. I think the
| parent comment is stating that if you're technical enough
| to install a 3rd party browser, you're technical enough
| to pick your own search engine. So people chose Firefox
| and chose away from Yahoo
| tomjen3 wrote:
| If Samsung is smart, then they ensure that their users gets
| access to new Bing as default, which means that even if
| people switch back (read get their nerdy friends to switch
| them back) they will find that Google is missing quite a lot.
| paulpan wrote:
| The frenemy status of Google-Samsung is once again on display.
| Samsung probably hasn't been happy with the Google's continued
| Pixel phone push :p
|
| But why is Google paying Apple to be the default search engine
| on iOS devices?
|
| It seems a waste of money as Apple would be stupid to default
| to any other search engine given the lower search quality
| results. End users would notice if there was a result
| degradation and likely switch their default. Google seems to be
| playing the "Intel Inside" part without reaping the marketing
| benefits and only paying the traffic acquisition costs.
| Sai_ wrote:
| Apple may not consider any other default search engine only
| in the absence of a search engine other than google offering
| a pot of money to be the default search engine.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| so without a default search engine what happens when you
| type some words in the address bar like every user has been
| trained to do?
| bushbaba wrote:
| Or they'd ask users which search engine they'd prefer.
| Likely a non small amount would prefer chat-Bing just to
| try it out
| tadfisher wrote:
| If Samsung really wasn't happy, they wouldn't be
| manufacturing Google's phones and providing custom silicon. I
| think the Pixel phones are a blip on Samsung's radar in terms
| of competition.
| rolph wrote:
| Google needs platforms. platforms only need to browse web.
| platforms wear the pants.
| [deleted]
| cleandreams wrote:
| I have begun to find bing search invaluable. It's annoying to use
| google although I don't even like the bing user interface for AI
| search. Much too hard to get to. I don't want a single extra
| keystroke.
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