[HN Gopher] Google is not a tech company
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       Google is not a tech company
        
       Author : davidlemayian
       Score  : 10 points
       Date   : 2023-11-18 14:07 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (davidlemayian.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (davidlemayian.com)
        
       | davidlemayian wrote:
       | Is Google a tech company or a company that uses tech?
        
         | dirtyhippiefree wrote:
         | That is the TL;DR...
        
       | k310 wrote:
       | IMO, any "tech" company that offers free services is an
       | advertising company. Picked up where newspapers left off. And
       | they weren't free.
       | 
       | They mostly can't figure how to get people to pay, or people are
       | unwilling to create a dozen or a hundred payment accounts, a
       | problem that still is unsolved after decades, despite efforts by
       | tech giants to monopolize the payment market.
       | 
       | The chances of any one account's data being hacked are too high,
       | and each new one adds more risk.
        
       | mfuzzey wrote:
       | Google is a company that builds a lot of tech but derrives most
       | of its revenue from advertising. I actually think that makes it
       | _better_ at tech than pure tech companies. It tends to mean the
       | PHBs who are more concerned with the revenue stream don 't get as
       | much in the way of the engineers as in companies where tech is
       | the revenue earning product.
       | 
       | Similarly in the open source world corporate sponsership is very
       | helpful in allowing people to dedicate large chunks of time to
       | things by employing them to work on open source (because its hard
       | to do good work quickly on evenings and weekends) but
       | corporations are usually bad if they try to control the
       | development. That's why projects like the Linux Kernel do so well
       | because corporations pay for hundreds to a few thousand
       | developers but don't get to stick their oar in on technical
       | decisions.
        
         | just_boost_it wrote:
         | Google does seem to have an issue with maintaining promising
         | apps. Maybe those would actually would do a bit better if the
         | teams those engineers were on actually had to make money. It
         | wouldn't be so much of an issue if they weren't smothering
         | similar apps before deciding they didn't like the ideas so much
         | after all.
        
       | VeejayRampay wrote:
       | Google built transformers
       | 
       | talk all you want about it's an ad company and da did da, in the
       | end the whole LLM revolution is built on their tech
        
       | kernal wrote:
       | >Let's start with a simple question: Is Google a tech company?
       | The answer is obviously yes.
       | 
       | Oh dear...
        
       | bionsystem wrote:
       | So the article admits that 40% of revenue is directly from tech
       | (Technology Products & Services, Software & Cloud Service, Data
       | Analytics & Other Services) and the remaining 60% is from Ads but
       | clearly enabled by tech innovation (Google, Youtube...).
       | 
       | Yep, it's a tech company.
        
       | mike_d wrote:
       | "Google is an advertising company that uses technology to corner
       | and dominate the ad market."
       | 
       | Facebook is a scrapbooking company that uses technology. Uber is
       | a taxi company that uses technology. Amazon is a flea market that
       | uses technology.
       | 
       | It is an old and boring trope.
        
       | redder23 wrote:
       | [delayed]
        
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       (page generated 2023-11-18 23:02 UTC)