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Google Claims They "Just Aren't That Big"
The New York Times is reporting that Google is making the case that they just aren't that big, especially from an anti-trust point of view. While they certainly corner the market in search, advertising, and online video, Dana Wagner, Google's "senior competition counsel," is working hard to convince the public that "competition is a click away." "None of the investigations take aim at Google's core advertising business. And unlike other technology giants in years past, Google has not been accused of anticompetitive tactics. But the investigations and carping from competitors and critics have Google fighting to dispel the notion that it has a lock on its market, even as it increases its share of search and online advertising. Eyes are rolling, especially in reaction to the idea that Google is a relatively small player in a giant market. 'They describe where they are in a market under a kind of a fairy-tale spun gloss that doesn't reflect their dominance of key sectors,' said Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. 'Google search is an absolute must-have for every marketer in the world.'"
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Sent from your iPad.
It's better than having a software monopolist tying their awful search engine into all their products and becoming number one.
They only dominate the market because of one thing.
They made a search engine that works and doesn't piss everyone off with flashing blinking ads everywhere!
Did google do anything to make all the other search engines suck ass? No.
Did google buy out the competition so they were #1? No.
Google just made a good service people CHOOSE to use.
They might still be subject to antitrust issues if they're dominant in a particular market, but the statement that they "aren't that big" does seem objectively true, by most measures other than public fame.
Some major tech companies by number of employees:
And by revenue:
And by net income:
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Heck, I've got lots of 'em.
Your market cap is $134 billion to put this into perspective IBM's is $139 billion and Microsoft's is $211 billion.
... you are a big dog. If you're pulling in more than a billion per quarter in sheer profit, you're going to lose that argument. Money is more important than number of employees when you're relating to other companies.
You may well employ far fewer than either of those two giants, but you aren't "running with the big dogs" now
My work here is dung.
the Register has an article up today entitled A Google monopoly today means packet sniffing tomorrow. Seems like the tech community has possibly learned from its past and may be a lot more hesitant to blindly support monopolies, no matter what their supposed "slogan" is.
"competition is a click away."
Yeah, just type the word competition in the search field and click on the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
While I agree with the statement that Google has not been anticompetitive AND with the statement that competition is "only a click away"*, Google does one thing that still makes them a large company on the order of Microsoft:
Google buys out the competition
Mergers and acquisitions are a matter of course for the technology industry. But when you build your portfolio by simply buying off the leader in a new market space, then you become a holding corporation. That's been the mark of Microsoft for two decades now and it's become the mark of Google as well. Google Groups (DejaNews), Google Docs (Writely), Youtube, Google Analytics (Urchin), Android, etc. all testify to this.
While I'll grant that Google adds their own spin to the products and often integrates them better than acquisitions made by many of their competitors, it still does not change the fact that Google purchases their markets. And that... that is a damning argument against their "we're not that big" statement.
* Ignoring the competitive advantage of Google's massive infrastructure for a moment.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
They are THAT big (that's what she said) but it's true that competition is just a click away. Apart from the obvious of just using another search engine, any documents you have on google docs can be converted properly to a lot of open source formats and you can leave. Social networking? Plenty of those. News aggregators? Plenty of those. Rss feeds? Plenty. Geolocation? Just throw on a tracker and use your own maps.
Really, there's nothing google does that can't be done by anyone else. They just do it damn well.
Fuck you microsoft and other motherfucking disable-fucking-copy-paste-if-licence-expires Office counterparts, THAT is anti-competitive, not google.
Google: "Googlee-uh penis-ah vely smarr. Amelican Govelnment penis-ah so big... sooo big."
Caveat Utilitor
Well then you're in idiot.
Well then you're in idiot.
'a' and 'i' aren't exactly near each other.
Interesting.
The part of Google that actually makes money is surprisingly small. The search engine staff was under 100 people until a few years ago, and about fifteen of them did all the hard parts. AdWords has more people, plus a sizable sales staff. But it's not huge, and it's smaller since Google closed some of their branch sales offices. At peak, Google had around 20,000 employees. Two years ago, they had about 12,000, and they could profitably shrink back to that level. They've been dumping excess contract employees for the last year.
The labor-intensive parts are mostly in the money drains - YouTube, GMail, etc.