Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Hi! Billy Mays here for GIANTCo.
Do you suffer from a lack of competition in your market place? Are your closest competitors light-years away from being a viable alternative to the solutions you offer? Well have I got just the thing for you! Introducing the amazing, the lovely, the Department of Justice! That's right folks, in just 10 easy years you can get a slap on the wrist and be deemed a monolopy.
But wait, there's more! What if I told you that if you called right now, we'd throw in a second DOJ fine ABSOLUTELY FREE?!?!
Call now, operators are standing by.
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
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!
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.
Market Cap is a mixture of future expectations, growth, hype, and irrational exhuberance.
GMGMQ, -- General Motors in a pink sheet -- has a market cap of 677 Million (10 times more than /. corporate parent sourceforge). Yet GM has earnings per share of -$60. Their true value is -$100 billion or so. In a few weeks, they'll finish their bankruptcy and that 677 million in market cap is guaranteed to drop to 0.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Google: "Googlee-uh penis-ah vely smarr. Amelican Govelnment penis-ah so big... sooo big."
Caveat Utilitor
Well then you're in idiot.
I don't know how strong my point will be here, since I haven't bothered to look up the data, but I wonder....
How many of the companies Google has bought out were publicly-traded companies? From first look, it doesn't seem like that many at all. And if that's the case, then the companies that sold out to Google, did so of their own volition and not because they were beholden to their public investors to make a decision that would make more money for the investors.