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Google Considered Too Big To Fail
theodp writes "Doc Searls is worried about the way Google makes money. 'Nearly all of it comes from advertising,' he frets. 'That's what pays for all the infrastructure Google is giving to the rest of us. As our dependency on Google verges on the absolute, this should be a concern.' Have we reched Peak Advertising? Blogger Dave Winer says amen, asking if Google is already 'too big to fail.'"
Nothing is "too big to fail".
At the current rate, people will shy away from Google as it's becoming an omnipresence on the internet which is raising concern.
There are numerous examples of things that could not be that happened, like the Titanic, Yahoo and Enron.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
Here it comes. Another company that when it screws up we will have to rescue because they are "too big to fail." Just what we need. Maybe there should be a limit on market cap so that no company is ever allowed to get to be too big to fail.
... but he probably doesn't.
That is so not cuil.
Then they will charge for their services. We will end up paying for google the same way we pay for TV channels (for those of us who still do...)
I mean, the world functioned without Google, and its competitors are as strong as ever before, (I'm looking at you, Bing and Yahoo).
But if you're asking if they'd be getting a bailout from the government, like all those other companies that were "too big to fail" (though really, they shouldn't be either) - than yeah they'd fall in that category.
I think we need to abolish the idea of "too big to fail". If a company can't handle it, they can't handle it, they deserve to be shut down, and everyone invested in it can lose all the money they invested in that risk, and everyone stuck owing debts to it can finally be debt free.
Is $COMPANY "$BUZZWORD"?
$PUNDIT says $COMPANY has utilized its $PRODUCT too much and $GOVERNMENT needs to do something about it. $BUZZWORD happened to $OTHER_COMPANY and $COMPANY is on the same path.
$FLOATNG ADVERT
$CEO says $COMPANY is responsbile. $OTHER_PUNDIT disagrees.
What does "reched" mean?
Just because lots of people use Google doesn't mean they can't and won't switch to something.
I'll miss Google if it goes, but really I'm not dependent on it - Yahoo search and Bing search are actually OK.
If your business or life is dependent on Google, then either you accept that, or you take measures to not be so dependent.
That's what pays for all the infrastructure Google is giving to the rest of us.
Let's get this out of the way: Google is not a bank.
So, what would happen?
If Google goes away, there would be other search engines that would fill in instantly.
Same for advertising.
Google goes away, so what?
Think of advertising as oil and Google as one big emirate. What happens when the oil runs out?
That's an incredibly stupid thing to say - equating oil with adverting!?
*condescending snicker*
If we've reached "peak advertising" its not Google which will suffer but TV and print...
Part of the beauty of what Google has done is made advertising cheap, quantifiable, and universal. Anyone can do it, anyone can measure it, and its cheap.
If a company wants to spend advertisement money efficiently, they spend it through Google. If they don't, they throw it away on the Superbowl, where the audience is 100M, and $3M an add, so that costs $.03 for each person who sees the add, regardless of whether they are interested, paying attention, or relevant.
Compare that with advertising through Google, where if you say, advertise on slashdot, not only is it cheaper per person, but its only geeks who may be interested in the ads presented.
Test your net with Netalyzr
That's why there's no such thing as Google for Domains. No such thing as the Google Search Appliance. Google Checkout? Figment of the imagination.
And as for advertising not being a sustainable form of revenue - you'd better tell that to all the world's television and radio stations. They think that's formed their core business for decades.
Short Answer: No, nothing is to big to fail.
Long Answer: There are OVER 1,000 search engines publicly available, one of them has your answer.
How about we just let them fail and have other more agile companies take their place? Should have happened with the banks and automakers. Those were political payoffs though. (Think Saturn. They weren't unionized, but profitable.)
--fatboy
All my apps are already portable - that's what my laptop is for.
I went through with my new years resolution to remove google from all my browsers. I use kmail - if I wanted a web-based mail (I don't), I can self-host either on my hosting server or on my home server. I have never used google docs, and never will.
Google won't go out of business ... but by the same token, while they are desperately trying to get into new markets, they're still a one-trick pony when it comes to generating profits.
Agreed. I initially used hotmail for years, and when gmail came along, I made the switch. It's not like you're married to your email account.
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?
Really? How dependent are you on Google?
For searching, you can always use Yahoo or Bing, or a few others. For replacing GMail, you can always use POP access to download your mail and keep it locally, run your own mailserver (after informing people of your new address), use your ISP's mail system, or another free email service. If you're using Google Maps for something, you could make do with Mapquest. If you're an advertiser on Google, there are lots of sites that would be happy to have you advertise on their sites instead. If you're doing SEO, you can follow Yahoo or Bing's rules at least as easily as Google's. If you had no Android phones, you'd still have iPhones. The list goes on for the vast majority of their offerings.
In all cases, Google has its dominant position not via lock-in, but by delivering services that are on par with or better than its competitors. Either that or sheer habit. But that's significantly different from, say, a Windows user's dependency on Microsoft.
I am officially gone from
Google has positioned itself to survive on the Internet once we move past point and click ads, pop-ups and direct marketed emails.
At the end of the day people need marketed to because they don't know where to go for the things they want/need. Google is positioning itself to do this directly with its overly large suite of products.
When businesses stop spending traditional advertising dollars they won't be able to bank them they'll just be forced to redirect them into Google.
Handsets, Buzz, GMAIL, Search engine data it all rolls up into a marketing profile so Google can predict what you're looking for. If Google can help get you to the right place and you buy something they will ultimately get a piece of the final sale.
Driving to work and need a coffee? Google has the data to get you to a Starbucks or a local Mom and Pop. Do you really think this will stay free for the businesses?
As a small business owner I am happy to turn them over a commission on sales I would have otherwise not received without their help.
I truly believe Google will become just another cost of doing business similar to how Visa/Mastercard charges are.
1) Google is wildly profitable
2) If it fails it'll cause very minor inconvenience to lots of sites as they switch to Bing
3) F*ck you for wasting our time with that alarmist crap
If you are that dependent on Google's "free" services, maybe you and they should start paying for them. Google does have a sales force where its "free" offerings are made available to enterprises with some additional bells and whistles and guarantees.
This is my sig.
My gawd! Did I actually say that? I....must....shower....NOW...
Table-ized A.I.
Or not.
There are plenty of free alternatives for people to migrate to. If there were no other alternatives, then you might have a point, but time and again, when someone starts charging for services available for free elsewhere, people just go elsewhere.
Hold on. Let me google if Google is too big to fail...
Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
*If* google fails, it won't be around one day and gone the next. In any case, there are other search engines that do a nearly as good a job as google, so we would still be able to do search. Migrating from Gmail would be slightly more complicated, but would still be doable, especially considering that all other free email providers would love to, and actively encourage and help anyone wanting to migrate. Generally, if google stumbles, there are plenty of others ready and willing to pick up the slack. -- Far more worrying would to have a systemic failure of the entire 'free stuff & ads 'business model. If providing free search and/or email (and social networking) is no longer profitable, we are truly screwed. It is not that we would have to pay much for search and email (marginal costs are very small); but the net would probably balkanize (if search isn't free, why would content? And in this case, why link to your competitor's content?) and stovepipe. Using the Internet use would end up looking like using a mobile phone. Useful, no doubt. But a shadow of what its former self. -- Sorry for the melodrama; but the current human architecture of the internet is very fortuitous, but was hardly inevitable. It emerged, largely unplanned, from a series of developments that could easily have happened elsehow. There are other ways of creating a world wide network, that would do almost all that the net does, but provide much more top-down control.
How much is Google paying you to say this? Is Yahoo, Bing, not to mention startpage not capable of filling the void?
There is a pretty big assumption in this article. The assumption is that Things will change, and google isn't smart enough to change their business model to compensate for changes. If ad revenue goes down to the point that google can not support their services, they can supplement that with a small charge for all of the services they offer. I'd happily pay a couple bucks a month for the google maps, reader, email, voice, translation, calendar, docs, wave, etc. They have many option available to them that may not be obvious now, but may be an option when the "Ad Bubble" pops. Plus it sounds like they are breaking into other areas, ie ISP, etc. I think they've shown enough intelligence to not cling desperatly to a failing business model, assuming things change enough to make their business model fail.
but not too big to fail. If Google decides it isn't making enough profit from advertising to give away services such as Gmail, Maps, etc. they can always start charging for it. I suspect there would be quite an uproar, but most would end up paying. I know I would.
Google's biggest problem is that they change to much and often in pointless ways. Froogle for instance has had about a half dozen names and keeps changing the way a merchant gets to their dashboard. Their second biggest problem is poor support even for paying customers. I swear their support people must be the stupidest people they could find in India because they don't understand what you're telling them and don't even make an effort to be useful. I've talked to walls that gave more useful responses.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
When you search on almost anything on Google, all you get is a listing of people who sell some item with your search term in the product name. Sometimes it isn't even that. Sometimes it a page that is another advertising search page.
At least when you search for something in Wikipedia you get to a topic, not an advert. The fact that people select Wikipedia to go to so often is likely why a Wikipedia search result is almost always near the top of a Google search. Most of the time, it is the only type of information a person is looking for. 'Tell me about subject xyz', I don't want to fucking buy it, just learn about it. A lot of the time now, except when looking for product (one I have already bought) or programming forums I just search Wikipedia immediately. The articles also usually have enough external links to get me surfing for more info without needing to use Google too much.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Maybe advertising is a bubble, but sometimes there really are products out there that would make your life 1000 times easier if you knew about them (if only university procurement departments could somehow be enlightened about the existence of 3ply toilet paper).
Don't do it, man, we'll have to revoke your GNU/Linux license.
If, in fact, the efficacy and saleability of online ads is crumbling, then we are currently enjoying a period where assorted google services and development initiatives are being subsidized for us by the suckers at various firms with advertising budgets. Presumably, if they catch on to the fact that they aren't getting bang for their buck, that subsidy will dry up.
It is always a sad occasion to lose a subsidy that was previously benefiting you; but it is only a disaster if there aren't other ways of paying for whatever it is that you need. In the case of Google, they have already been playing with pricing schemes for enterprise versions of various of their services, and it wouldn't be rocket surgery for them to roll out retail equivalents if the ad market really tanks(Frankly, I for one would in some respects be relieved to be paying straight, rather than in personal data). Given their years of experience running their services on the comparatively thin sauce of advertising money, Google could still easily offer very competitive pricing.
The people I would be much more worried about are the huge number of random third party websites that run ads in order to more-or-less break even on bandwidth/hosting. Because Google is big, and comparatively trusted, and offers services that most of its users use more or less continually(ie. I might visit "randomwebsite.com" once, or once every few months, but I'm likely to check a gmail account or do a bunch of google searches every day to every few days). If the ad market does in fact tank, Google, and similar large entities, will be able to just start billing directly without transaction costs eating them alive. Since micropayments are still more or less a pipe dream, the little guys won't be able to do the same.
Having to pay $X/year for gmail would be a minor nuisance. Having large numbers of ideosyncratic 3rd party sites either dry up or move into walled gardens who would act as payment processors/aggregators(Hello iTunes!) would be a serious and negative change to the web.
This is particularly a concern because, while Google is quite good at what it does, most of its offerings are in substantially commodified markets. Gmail is one of the better free webmail services out there; but it is hardly the only one. Even if all free webmail services dried up, pay webmail services of quite modest cost are also a dime a dozen. Our only "absolute dependence" on Google is exactly the same dependence on any email provider, the fact that switching email addresses sucks. In search, again, Google is good at search; but switching to a different search page isn't terribly difficult. A few legacy devices/programs that depend on some search API and cannot be usefully updated might be up shit creek; but everybody else would be fine. Android would probably suffer if its primary developer/main unifying backer disappeared or defunded the project; but there would be nothing stopping the core OSS components moving forward on the devices of whoever wanted to use them. The fact that all this has traditionally been free is handy; but switching to paying for it, either from Google or from somebody else, would be doable.
It is the thousands of random little guys, occupying all the weird little unique niches, that would be more of an issue. Few of them are large enough to make subscription pricing reasonable, even if people would stand for that, and micropayment is going nowhere outside of walled gardens that aggregate the micropayments, which aren't a terribly encouraging development.
You are not very bright. Just because *you* don't care doesn't mean that *most* don't care.
In fact, it's just the opposite. Most people do care because most people use at least one or more Google services on a daily basis. You're the odd man out here.
Unfortunately, there isn't a mod for "Tiresome Bleeding Obvious Opinion that Every 2nd Poster Will Feel Compelled to Share", so we have to go with Redundant
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Willem Buiter suggested some ideas to deal with the problem of "too big to fail". The tax ideas is quite interesting, but as always the problem is enforcing it without just driving the company oversees. There's also the concept of "too big to save", where the company exceeds too big to fail by becoming so expensive to bail out that it can't be saved (see what happened to the defaulting Icelandic banks, for instance), I wonder how long it would take Google to reach this point, and who would bail it out - the US or every country that has an interest in it not failing?
I'm not sure "too big to fail" is such an issue in Google's case anyway. At the moment they have money to burn and they seem to be acting like a TBTF company on a mad spending spree, but if revenues fall it's easy enough to reign that in, it's similarly easy to reign in spending on data centres. it's not like advertising will suddenly drop off a cliff one day. If it goes away (and I find this unlikely, even today I was reading a report that traditional offline advertising boosts online conversions by up to 40%, so the idea that old forms of advertising are losing their relevance doesn't seem right), it's likely to be a gradual decline and Google and everyone else will have time to prepare/scale down/find a new model.
I wonder if this is partially why Google is trying to get into the phone market and infrastructure, to mitigate "peak advertising".
kdawson posts the stupidest stories on /. I'm going to categorically skip anything posted.
I have never used google docs, and never will.
Hey, google docs is GREAT for tracking treasure and experience points for role playing games.... but yeah, I wouldn't trust it for anything else.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
They said the same thing about the Titanic...
How about we just let them fail and have other more agile companies take their place? Should have happened with the banks and automakers. Those were political payoffs though. (Think Saturn. They weren't unionized, but profitable.)
Automotive, maybe. Banks are a trickier proposition, because so many other businesses rely on them for lines of credit, and their model was so incestuous that one or two big failures would bring down a lot of others, and while the banks might have deserved that, the customers arguably didn't. Not shoring up banks is a great way to sit back and watch your economy tank because nobody has the liquidity to move goods and services around.
You do not see stories like this worrying about TV and it is all supported by advertising.
Yo momma so fat, Obama said she's too big to fail.
Kinda like your mom.
BING is a recursive acronym. Bing is not google.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
News to me that they were profitable. They managed to barely eek out a profit some quarters while relying on some of the other GM network services to lighten the load. The brand name recognition was horrible, and demographics showed that their buyer pool was being hit extraordinarily hard (single, working mothers were their largest demographic) in the recession, and that they were going to dip back into being very not profitable.
I agree with you with the whole let them fail deal. If we can't let them fail, then we should have bailed them out, parted them up and sold them to other banks.
It all seems rather unlikely, I can imagine someone slowly taking away google's advertisign business but I don't see that advertising will suddenly disapear which is what this article seems to be based on
(Think Saturn. They weren't unionized, but profitable.)
Uhh, Saturn was unionized (UAW) and was only profitable for 1 year out of its entire existence (1993).
Not to say that the union was the problem, but not having a union does not give you the able to ignore trends, consumer demands, and quality controls and still have a successful company.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
For replacing GMail, you can always use POP access to download your mail and keep it locally
And loosing all your precious information, like in which folder it is, is it tagged as read, important, etc. ? No way.
The only way to properly copy/move your GMail box is to use IMAPSync (or something alike, but IMAPSync is the best).
For the truly paranoids, you can even regularly backup all your mail from GMail to another IMAP server (say, your own Cyrus imapd), so you can't be taken by surprise when Google pulls the plug.
The advertising bubble will pop right after people stop acting like sheep. So long as the majority of consumers do what they are told to do advertising dollars are safe, and so are our "free" Google services. In reality they aren't free, it's a free market barter of our usage information for their tools and apps.
"to big to be allowed to fail".
The banks/insurers have demonstrated that "to big to fail" does not mean they can't fail.
'too big to fail.'? Say that to the Roman Empire...
Some dumbass mods are on today. I've been seeing this on a few threads...
Most innovation appears to come from small and medium companies. Larger companies tend to spend most of their resources protecting their turf using their size as their main weapon, not innovation. Microsoft, GM, and IBM (of 70's) are probably the poster-boys of big-but-stagnant companies. Sure, IBM of the 70's pioneered some novel ideas, but not in proportion to their size. Mini's and micro's were where most of the action was. Microsoft gets a lot of credit for ideas that they actually stole or bought from rivals.
Japan used to protect its domestic car industry. However, it had about a dozen companies competing with each other *in* Japan, and this is where the current giants such as Toyota, Honda, and Nissan came from. Having a dozen companies made them more competitive than the US Big-3. The Big-3 tended to be clubby, making them lethargic. By some accounts, if an ad attacked a rival's Detroit brand too harshly, a "gentleman's agreement" was made between CEO's to back off. Having 12 instead of 3 car co's made a noticeable difference.
The right-wing side of our government likes to talk about the power of competition, yet don't actually back it because they let companies grow too large in the name of non-government-interference. The problem is that these two goals may be in conflict. (Democrats are only marginally better in this regard, I should point out, perhaps because of the influence of heavy lobbying.)
Further, splitting a company is not necessarily punishing a company. It just becomes two medium-sized companies instead of one big one. It may bother some in upper management who want an empire, but screw them. Having a vibrant and diverse market-place is more important, and the evidence is that splitting works. Perhaps the "splitties" should be given nice tax breaks for a few years to make the transition a bit more pleasant.
Table-ized A.I.
Ya know what? I remember when AltaVista, Yahoo, and HotBot were too big. AOL was too. Notice how the advertisers always find someplace else to go, they always go to whatever the latest hot new thing is. So no, I don't think there's anything new to see here.
C|N>K
How about we just let them fail and have other more agile companies take their place?
Exactly. It's supposed to be survival of the fittest. Bailing out big companies is comparable is like keeping a comatose obese 89 year old man (who's just had his 3rd heart attack) alive on life support. At that point you're doing it for the warm fuzzies of making his family feel better.
"If you are going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill
FPs get karma burned. You must be new here. Also what Rogerborg said.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
Realistically, if you have only one main source of revenue it is a concern that if you lose your crown there (which is not impossible in the search world), then the rest of your company comes falling down.
For a company like mine who looks at Google apps as a potential for change, we look at profitability of the company. People are enticed by the 'geek friendly' nature of Google, but forget to realize that if their one revenue stream is cut somehow, that it would adversely affect us in a very negative way. Already there has been some downtime, and for our business we'd require a lot of custom work Google has already had to do for others because their product lacked.
When they get profitability on multiple fronts like Apple, or Microsoft, perhaps it is more worth looking at their offerings. But from our point of view right now, the risk is too high, the products too immature, and the benefit not there.
Maybe in another 5 years or so.
But jeez, I really don't want to say "Let me Bing that for you" or "Let me Yahoo that for you" because it just doesn't roll off the tongue the same way.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
I can not, will not, do my searching without image-search and the option to actually see what I'm looking for! So bing is a no-go for me :'(
Maybe there should be a limit on market cap so that no company is ever allowed to get to be too big to fail.
Perhaps we should repeal Sarbanes-Oxley instead and save some money on companies' bottom lines. I've heard that SOX adds 4% to operating costs, and the funny thing about it is that it was enacted, reflexively I may add, in the wake of Enron and Worldcom, which, when looked back upon under the light of SOX, would have likely happened the same way anyway.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
Google could make money any number of ways. They could open their own online everything store, and take a cut, Googazon. They could offer ad free search for so much a year subscription. They are already getting into the phone business, and could extend that to netbooks, etc. ISP business as the recent article outlines. Hosting services. Heck, how about scientific journals that are open to the public for much more reasonable fees than what the current bigdogs charge? General news, and keep undercutting these proposed paywalls that certain of the other large news orgs will be going to. They could go into the alternative energy business in bulk, sell electricity, or even sell solar arrays, stuff like that. Put up their own huge windchargers.
How about a googlemobile? These guys are interested in all sorts of cool stuff. They have enough presence to get their own brand of electric vehicles out there if they wanted to. Googlemusic, make offers to bands to host and sell their tunes for like reasonable cheap, like a dime instead of a dollar, with a 50/50 split with the musicians. I mean geez, if you got buhzillions in cash right how, there are any number of interesting offshoot businesses you could get into, and by keeping margins really low, they could get market share..
They won't be stuck on advertising alone for income.
I went through with my new years resolution to remove google from all my browsers.
As of right now, obsolete versions of Internet Explorer still account for roughly 35 percent of web usage share: 20% IE 6 and 15% IE 7. In order to deploy a web application that works on both downlevel Internet Explorer and standards-based web browsers, you can A. spend time and money working around all of IE's CSS bugs, file format deficiencies (no real XHTML, no SVG), and lack of new elements such as <canvas>, or embed a browser within a browser. The ActiveX browser control based on Gecko appears to be unmaintained for years, but Google offers one called Chrome Frame. So what do you recommend that sites hosting web applications use instead of Chrome Frame?
isn't it funny how we so desperately try to avoid the Caste System that foreign nations use only to have created one ourselves under a different name?
Caste is by birth. Class is at least supposed to be based in part on effort.
Really, people, get over yourselves, stop the hand wringing and cries that the sky is falling. Big companies have failed. Countries have failed. Empires have failed. We rebuild. In fact, we build something better.
The alternative is propping up things that actually aren't working. GM. Most of the airline industry. If Google fails, it will introduce a massive wave of opportunity for entrepreneurs out there who have ideas that they can't pursue now because the threat that Google will eat their lunch is too great.
It's entirely possible companies can be too big, in the sense that they cause problems for the economy, but they are never too big to fail.
You could have bailed out the customers of the banks and let the banks themselves fail.
And we should have shot the board of directors of those banks, on live television.
If they don't, they throw it away on the Superbowl, where the audience is 100M, and $3M an add, so that costs $.03 for each person who sees the add
The advantage of advertising on television is that it's interstitial and therefore demands more of the viewer's attention than a web ad. TV users are far less likely to avoid channels that use interstitial ads than web users. To extend the analogy to televised sports, the common web ads are more like the billboards on the sidelines: easy to ignore.
That's why there's no such thing as Google for Domains. No such thing as the Google Search Appliance. Google Checkout? Figment of the imagination.
What % of revenue are these things?
And as for advertising not being a sustainable form of revenue - you'd better tell that to all the world's television and radio stations. They think that's formed their core business for decades.
You must be living in a hole somewhere?
"Good programing is expensive," Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp. owns
Fox, told a shareholder meeting this fall. "It can no longer be
supported solely by advertising revenues."
Over-the-air broadcasts are subsidized in part by revenue from pay-tv streams from stations that fall under the same corporate umbrella (Disney, ABC, etc).
Local affiliates have over the past few years battled pay-tv sources over revenue streams, asking for more and more to carry their signal.
Parent companies are also looking to cash in on the affiliates asking for paybacks on what the affiliates receive -- if the parent companies don't get revenue from pay-tv sources from their affiliates, they may implode the free tv model by becoming a pay-only channel, leaving the affiliates to come up with their own content.
To say ad revenue alone is sustainable for free content is near sighted...
The concept of "too big to fail" pertains only to those financial concerns that have been allowed to get so large that their failure would have catastrophic affects on the economy. While we saw many financial giants fail this year, the "too big to fail" aspects came into play in the way regulators and the Federal Government worked out deals to stem total collapse of our financial system. With Google, that will never happen because the nature of the business is completely different.
Google is not critical to the financial markets in the way the big banks and insurance companies were. When big financial companies fail, they can create a cascade effect that can take out little financial companies with them. When a company like Google fails, there are dozens if not hundreds of companies (large and small) in the free market that are waiting in the wings and ready to pounce for a piece of the pie.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
So, if the rumors about Bing being an acronym for "Bing Is Not Google", then what happens when a recursive name collapses in on itself?
That's why there's no such thing as Google for Domains. No such thing as the Google Search Appliance.
The R&D on those is largely subsidized by the advertising-supported Google Search indexing of the public web.
LOL
you forgot to mention the grinding pain and poverty of the general population because of that for years
your attitude seems to be "malaria? well then lie in the bed with fevers and chills until its over. forget this quinine crap, suffer like a man! walk it off!"
you bail these companies out to save a lot of common people who did nothing to create this horrible mess form a lot of financial pain
THAT'S the point of the bailouts
not because we like to save banking asshats from themselves
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This is written from a monetarist's perspective, since there are no more Keynesians of note except for congress, and then only during budgeting debate. The banks had to be bailed out. The reason the banks had to be bailed out is that banks are the way the country increases its money supply. I know many people won't believe this, but when banks make loans then the money from the loan doesn't come from the vault and isn't withdrawn from an account. It's newly created money expressly for the purpose of making the loan. The only semblance of a withdrawal is that a fraction of that money, usually about 10%, has to be earmarked as required reserves from the money the bank has on deposit with the Federal Reserve System. As a corollary, every time you make a payment, then that money is destroyed. That doesn't mean that the dollar bills that you used to make the payment get destroyed. It just means that ten percent of that is no longer earmarked as required reserves.
One symptom of the recent economic crisis is that the banks stopped making loans. Money was no longer being created. At the same time, though, people kept making payments on their loans. Mostly. That means that the rate of destruction of money was greater than the rate of its creation, and the money supply was declining. Another symptom is that cash in the vault grew greater than that needed for day-to-day operations, so banks started depositing that with the Federal Reserve System, making their reserves grow in excess of their reserve requirements. Those dollar bills were no longer in the pockets of people wanting to buy things, and those loans were no longer in the checking accounts of those people, so we were on the precipice of another depression.
The problem congress faced was coming up with a way to explain that to the American people. "Increasing the money supply" doesn't resonate with the taxpayers who were going to have to pick up the tab. "Avoiding a depression" doesn't go far enough to explain the situation. "Too big to fail" on the other hand works. Taxpayers could understand that the banks were being bailed out because of all the people who were going to lose their jobs, plus it's nice to get to avoid a depression. The problem didn't come until later. Chevrolet and Chrysler tried to fail, and they were bigger than any of the banks. Plus, the people they employed were much more visible. Surely, if the banks were too big to fail then the auto makers were. It didn't hurt that the auto workers were voters, so they got bailed out too. After that, though, who doesn't deserve to be bailed out? Anyone laid off is going to have a really hard time of it. Besides, why shouldn't a family man get some help from government, when the bankers are awarding themselves million dollar bonuses out of the bailout money?
So, short term, the banks had to be bailed out. Long term, though, we should change our monetary system so the banks can be allowed to fail. We've had the current system so long that it's hard to imagine a different system, but there are other systems. One such system is outlined in Milton Friedman's "A Program for Monetary Stability."
~Loyal
I aim to misbehave.
The bigger you are, the harder you fail.
/* No Comment */
At least when you search for something in Wikipedia you get to a topic, not an advert.
Either that or a deletion log entry stating that your topic is "non-notable".
It isn't even clear that the sort of business that Google is in could be subject to "too big to fail"(in anything other than the sense based strictly on lobbying power). The trouble with the financial sector is that it can easily develop gigantic, volatile, incestuous, and substantially secret background interactions that allow problems in one area or entity to spread rapidly and unpredictably to others. Further, because so many of the various assets and liabilities in that business were mathematical constructs with assorted perverse properties, it was entirely possible, and frequently happened, that an entity's assets or liabilities could fluctuate wildly in short spans of time
Google, on the other hand, is in the fairly boring business of converting electricity, computer hardware, and technical expertise(all commodities with fairly predictable and well behaved prices) into various sorts of web services that they can use to sell ads or(currently to a lesser extent) sell directly. They are nowhere near as tightly coupled to either their suppliers or their customers as the financial cowboys were, and the prices of both their inputs and their outputs are nowhere near as unstable.
If they were to slowly go out of business, their customers could simply migrate away(switching the URL you type in to do a web search is trivial, migrating a mailbox to which you have IMAP or POP access isn't hard, buying ads from somebody else isn't rocket science, Android's core components are OSS, so that could stagger on as long as anybody is still interested), as could their suppliers(making whitebox servers for Google is pretty much the same as making whitebox servers for anybody else, selling electricity to datacenters is pretty much the same no matter who owns them, programmers and sysadmins float around all the time).
If they, somehow, went out of business overnight, things would be pretty disruptive for a while(millions of people unable to access their email would be ugly); but, even there, the incentives would be overwhelming for whoever was in charge of the winding down and selling off to do the least disruptive thing(ie. if you just sold Google for scrap, you'd get peanuts on the dollar. Used servers are pretty boring, excess datacenter capacity isn't wildly exciting except at a discount, there are probably some interesting patents, and a bit of office space. If you sold it off at a service level(ie. spin a division off to continue running their paid business stuff, offer all their free customers the option to either upgrade to that or pay a one-time fee for one more week of access to their data so they could migrate away, then sell the remains for scrap, you would get a lot more).
Even if google were larger than they are, they just aren't volatile or tightly coupled enough to be "too big to fail".
IMAP and IMAP integrated Webmails like fastmail.fm exist for ages... Please, stop this idiocy... At least on Slashdot!
Have we reched Peak Advertising? You misspelled retched.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Not for long. There's some evidence that they're adding video rentals to Youtube to try and turn it into something Hulu-like.
Yet Another Tech Blog
(but so much more, including game and movie reviews)
http://yanteb.peasantoid.org
It's about whether or not you can convince a bunch of idiot politicians that you are too big to fail
It would seem a false dilemma to me. The heavily-debted and mismanaged companies should be dead, but the innocent should be covered. It's not really that hard: if we had a decent social security structure that would be the norm, and not something that would need to be devised after the fact.
We cooperate as a society to give the individual protections like that, but the corporations and their stakeholders are supposed to be rich enough to take the risks they are taking. In other words, means test the safety nets.
But no, we shouldn't be bailing out the AIGs and GMs of this world.
Read "Natural Born Clickers, the ComScore study referenced in the article. "Only 8% of Internet users now account for 85% of all clicks". And that 8% has lower than average income and doesn't buy much on line.
The basic problem with Google's business model is not a killer problem for Google. It's for all those sites sucking off the "Google Content Network" teat. Ads on search results have value because they're presented at when the user is looking for something. Random ads on web pages aren't that valuable to advertisers. Most advertisers run them because Google's AdWords systems bundles them with search ads. (Advertisers can opt out, but the opt-out checkbox is hidden and doesn't opt you out of everything.) Worse, Google charges the same price for a click on a search result ad and a Google ad on some random site, while studies show that the search result ad is worth maybe 20x the value of the ad on some random site.
Amusingly, Google offers a lower price for the "content network" ads, but they only tell advertisers about it when they try to opt out of the "content network" program.
The big advertisers have figured this out. Note how few Google ads on random web sites are for major brands. Google tries to keep advertisers from developing metrics to measure click-through value; the AdWords contract prohibits advertisers from sharing their click stats. But enough information has leaked out that advertisers are getting wise to this. There's now a Content Network Cleanser product to kick bottom-feeder sites out of an advertiser's campaign. But it's retrospective; you pay for useless clicks, then find out about them and block those sites.
A shakeout is coming. As more advertisers get wise to the uselessness of the "Google Content Network", they'll opt out, while keeping their search ads. Google will have to cut the price for ads on third-party sites. This will put the screws on all the sites whose entire revenue stream comes from those ads. (Like Slashdot.)
This won't kill Google, but it may cut into their revenue.
There's nothing new here. Too big to fail really doesn't apply. This sort of FUD has been spread time and again. Move on.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
If Google collapses it will be like the death of a whale in the ocean. There will be a feeding frenzy picking its bones clean. At first it will be many little critters, and some bigger critters gobbling up market share and assets. Then the better nibblers will consume the weaker. Eventually we'll have something Google-like as king of the heap.
When the .com boom happened there were many tiny companies creating markets out of thin air. Some of those markets were worth something, others were not. Some of these companies had good leadership, some were in the right place at the right time. The weaker companies died off and the strongest thrived.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
and while the banks might have deserved that, the customers arguably didn't.
Right. That's why the government set up the FDIC long ago, to protect bank account holders in case of a run on the banks.
If we're just going to bail out the banks when they screw up, then what's the point of having an FDIC?
All those car factories would still have existed, just with new owners now. They could still make cars, or perhaps something else. They would have needed workers, and would have been in a position to offer a fair, but less ridiculous salary and benefits package for factory work.
A real bankruptcy and liquidation is that, stuff gets sold, the new owners use it. Stockholders would have been taught a lesson that they need to do due diligence on their executive employees better, management would have learned you can't be stupidly top heavy, and the rank and file boys would have realized they need to not expect as much as they think they are worth, not in a global economy.. So all around, it would have been better for that to happen, long range.
I feel the same away about those bloated tick parasite casino banks, they should have been allowed to go bankrupt, then we could have sorted out what all those scam paper financial products are really worth, which is..not near as much as they contend now. I think society has hit "peak wealth leeching" with those guys.
Ya, it would have sucked a little for a couple of years, but the resulting economy would have been MUCH better. Less stupid overpaid fatcats sucking out of the system, more middle class actual productive wealth creation jobs back.
As it is now, all they have done is reward those who failed in the first place, and given them incentive to just follow the same failed policies. Quite dumb really. Slap this generation and the next several in debt for this to happen, too. That's not dumb, that's outright criminal.
" I let this one idiotic post pass through to give you all an idea of what kind of assholes show up when you get Slahsdotted these days. Dave"
Automotive, maybe. Banks are a trickier proposition, because so many other businesses rely on them for lines of credit, and their model was so incestuous that one or two big failures would bring down a lot of others, and while the banks might have deserved that, the customers arguably didn't. Not shoring up banks is a great way to sit back and watch your economy tank because nobody has the liquidity to move goods and services around.
Maybe that's a hint that we should re-think this whole house-of-cards/smoke-and-mirrors economy we have going?
"At the end of the day people need marketed to because they don't know where to go for the things they want/need....so Google can predict what you're looking for."
I'm not looking to be sold anything. I'm looking for information, content. When the signal to noise ratio gets to a point where all a search returns are links to sites where something is sold -- when it becomes overly hard to find pure content as opposed to ads, when Google devolves into a shopping search site, that's when people will leave. The positioning you mentioned above is directly set up to do that. Content is being sacrificed in order to achieve revenue.
Look at it this way....would people tune in to 24 each week to have Jack Bauer turn to the camera every five minutes to say something like "That Red-Bull really helped motivate me to kick that terrorist's ass." "After a long day saving the country, I like to relax watching my library of Fox Blu-Ray movies on my new Sony HD tv, the sound from the Bose speakers is amazing."
The Bing commercials have some iota of truth when they mention "search overload" the "overload" being marketing.
I submit that Apple is too awesome to fail.
Is there a government bailout for that?
Is Google so big that even Google can not google it?
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
Google is losing half a billion a year on youtube. Initially, "The Great Idea" was to acquire it, and use the supposed synergies to not only enhance the google brand, but get youtube to make a profit.
Competitors will always be able to present the same content for lower cost because they aren't also hosting non-paying content, so even if google does start a hulu-like service, they won't have the same operating margins their competitors will.
You'll notice that Step 2 is missing. There is no way to get from step 1 to step 3 as long as other competitors don't have the extra overhead of supporting a free "video-blogging" service.
On a totally unrelated note I am going to live on fat and sugar from now on so I can get Too Fat To Die!
Nice try. I think your idea might work:
fat chance
Can you say "Epic Fail?"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"But it doesn't look the exact same in [insert browser version]!" My response to that is "Who gives a sh*t?"
I'm talking about overlapping floats, elements that are supposed to disappear but don't, etc. Try looking at the Acid Tests in IE 6 to see what fails hard.
Then make it into a network-enabled Java or python or tck/perl or whatever application
If I did, I would run into a different issue: "Java or python or tck/perl" might not be installed on a given machine where the user expects to use a web app. Case in point: Wii runs none of the above. iPhone runs none of the above. iPad runs none of the above. And most importantly, the PC in the public library or the office break room runs none of the above.
The bail-outs were to prevent a run on the banks -- which would have been far more serious than the depression in 1920, and probably 1929 as well. There was no run on the banks in 1920 -- so no bank bailout would have been warranted.
Not every economic crisis is exactly the same as the every other one. There is no canned solution to solve economic problems. Intelligence must be applied because situations have unique qualities. Talk about armchair economics.
Lassiez-faire doesn't solve the worlds evils either -- but that is another story, and I wouldn't want to tread on your ideology. It seems to be what you are advocating.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
That's part of the problem: We don't really have that kind of social safety net for individuals in this country, at least not one that could handle the stress of all those people going unemployed at once.
i am not arguing that saving banking asshats is fair. i'm saying the banking asshats are so embedded, that it is impossible to make them suffer and only them suffer
if you are saying suffering by everyone is inevitable because of what the bankers did, i'm not buying that. nothing's inevitable. we can still suffer in 5 more years, or maybe not. you take it as act of faith that we have only forestalled the inevitable rather than actually cured the disease
what do i believe? perhaps we have only forestalled the inevitable. i have an open mind about the future, we might not have solved the problem. meanwhile, if you are telling me with CERTAINTY we have only forestalled the inevitable, then you are just announced yourself as a brainwashed partisan hack. no one knows the future, including you
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Not to mention Google Federal or Google's Fiber plans or you know, Android.
Planning to be moderated ± 1: Bad Pun.
Like many of the other posters here, I think that if Google disappeared tomorrow, it would be an inconvenience at worst. Granted, it could be a big inconvenience for some people, but no one would end up homeless, in the hospital, or in the morgue.
The real risk is that Google is a publicly-owned company, so all of the personal data they've collected on, well, all of us would suddenly become an asset to be sold off to the highest bidder to pay off the investors and creditors. You may safely assume that the highest bidder probably won't have "don't be evil" as a motto. In fact, of the handful of companies that would have the resources to be the highest bidder, all of them have CEOs I'd like to install as payloads on rockets to the sun with their boards of directors duct-taped to the outside of the nosecone to serve as heat shields.
So yes, while I could move my email in about ten minutes, and hopefully someone would save the old Usenet archive, the idea that many of the details of the last ten years of my online life would be accessible to anyone with deep enough pockets is more than a little disquieting.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
the tragedy we are living in is this great mass of ignorants, propagandized into fighting that which will only help and save them
in the healthcare townhall "debates" last summer an old deranged lady shouted "keep your socialist hands off my medicare!"
that about sums up the "principled" opposition to braindead obvious simple progress in this country. its demagogues, in the employ of big business, and the lobbyists buying off their representatives, who are selling the american people a state of impoverishment. because they should be afraid of "socialism"
pathetic, tragic, sad
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Who is this doc, and why do we care what he thinks about googles ads? Tell me the government is interested because of possible fraud or tax evasion, tell me someone is interested in becoming a competitor and are having a hard time and looking for input, but don't tell me some whiny guy needing some 15 minutes of blog fame needs to tell us why he thinks google ads are a boon to his existence.
The blogger stating 'to big to fail' in quotes (note the quotes) is not stating that Google will not fail.
He is stating that society relies on Google for infrastructure as if there was no risk in it ever failing.
He is communicating a warning as those of the past made did about other companies that were 'to big to fail'
Google's business model does have risks. Therefore, relying on Google for infrastructure is a risk. Wake up!
CS
the '20s was a bubble, you idiot
just like the one we are crawling out of now. hello?
the roaring twenties was borrowing against the future, the bubble collapsed, and we suffered, horribly, for a decade
that you should be celebrating such financial ignorance and irresponsibility as "a great time to be an american", you are only announcing your abject ignorance. it is because of thinking like yours that we are in the current mess we are in. thanks a lot, shortsighted asshole
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
One of the biggest concerns about Google is that it would be another Excite@Home.
The @Home corporation took down Excite right about the time of the Tech Bubble Burst. If anyone remembers having an Excite email address, when Excite had all these free services to store some of your information online, you probably remember Excite having to delete all of your stuff as the company meltdown thanks to their business partners at @Home.
To call Google a company that is too big to fail would definitely be an understatement, especially if like Excite, they had no plan of action in the event the company collapses.
Companies like Google need some kind of living trust, much like a person who in the event of their death, can hold on to the property (physical or intangible), the data can be transfered to a smaller company that can take care of the data Google's customers asked them to hold on to.
Another Idea would be to create a government agency similar to the FDIC that instead of insuring money, insures data, either provides a backup of the data that you have posted online that you and only you can access it if the company you use to hold that data bellies-up, and provides compensation if that data is lost.
The only problem with having the federal government create such an agency is the fact that they are the Federal Government. There is information about yourself that they have that you can't access unless you are either a member of law enforcement or part of the agency that collects all that data about you. Which is stupid, considering if you want to know everything about yourself, including things that you don't know about that may prevent you from getting a loan or a job, you can never learn more about yourself to do anything positive or constructive that could offset the things in the past, or that you are doing, that can prevent you from living a better life that could help you be a better person.
If there is something about you that you want to know, it should never be a secret from you. And if there is stuff that you want to save, you shouldn't have to lose it because the company you entrusted to hold on to it was too big to fail.
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
Google is not only not too big to fail, they must and will fail in this decade. They make money selling your data about you without clear consent. If sued they will not likely win which is why the settle every time the verdict is doubt. Hands down the most dishonest and dangerous company around today.
This is the company that publicly said IP address doesn’t impact privacy and then wrote a 400 page brief on linking them (ip addresses) to a location and users for a court case. Gaining access to this data isn’t as difficult as you might think and could easily destroy someone and would be difficult if not impossible to repair.
Register your own domain name, derive your personal email from the domain you now own... With Google apps managing your domains, you get "gmail" , with the added benefit of address portability. When the big G finally succumbs to the inevitable evil of all megacorps (or "fails") move your domain to the next big thing, but you won't have to change your address. Ahhh - the joy of DNS!
Google says that it is.
NO COMPANY is "too big to fail." ANY company that fails will be replaced by a competitor. There are *NO* exceptions. Fuck, man, if the government props up a failing company then they are using their power to keep a more innovative, non-failing company from getting a stronger market share.
AltaVista still exists, right?
' Have we reched Peak Advertising? I think that was supposed to be ' retched '? Or ' wretched ??
Of course we hit peak advertising. That occurred a long time ago with the dawn of the download. Why the hell would I want to sit through advertisements when I can download it and not watch them? Why would I want to see ads on the internet if I can turn them all off with AdBlock? STOP TRYING TO SELL ME THINGS I DON'T NEED!
Neutiquam erro
When Google holds people's pension funds, and well being in their hands, then I'll worry. Until then, I think I could survive just fine without Google search.
Marketing is one of the defining features of an advanced economy. It isn't some temporary stage that you shrug off as you get to the next stage of development. So far there is no next stage of development. ... We are no where near a post-marketing society.
That's an insightful remark. The cost of marketing many products and services now exceeds the cost of providing them. Long-distance phone service, for example. Note that there's very little marketing of long-distance phone service now, while it was once heavily promoted. Now, it's typically bundled with something else, to cut the marketing cost. It's worth asking what other products and services may go through that transition.
Nothing is too big to fail now that we have failblog.org!
If you do what you always did, you get what you always got.
Doc Serls is a Linux guy. And, what was it, 2 weeks ago or so, that Linuxheads got bent out of shape because Google was writing some stuff in the Android code that couldn't be folded into the regular linux distro?
And acting like basing your income on advertising is a bad strategy shows a distinct lack of understanding of human economic history. Advertising has worked, and worked well, since ancient Greek prostitutes wrote "Follow Me" in reverse on the soles of their sandals, leading customers to their whorehouse.
Some are all a-twitter that advertising is gonna collapse because television stations are cutting budgets due to ad revenues. First off, television stations are cutting budgets because they're only making 15% profit instead of 22%. They're doing just fine. In fact many of them are cutting budgets because they recently spent a boatload of money buying automated production equipment so that they could fire controlroom workers, and then furloughed more staff to make up for the money that they spent. Second, if ads are going away from television (and the $100,000 per second advertising rate during the Super Bowl would seem to belie that idea) that doesn't mean ads are going away. It just means they're going to the internet - - you know, the market that Google seems to have cornered?
IF Google's business plan collapses, it's not going to be until something replaces the internet. And realistically, whatever replaces the internet is probably going to be. . Another internet - only with 3d virtual reality instead of flat webpages. And Google will most likely adapt right along with that - if they don't invent the thing themselves.
"I disagree with you" does not equal "flamebait."
You have to admit that it's a great idea.
Yet Another Tech Blog
(but so much more, including game and movie reviews)
http://yanteb.peasantoid.org
This article is moronic. The author rails that Google to too big to fail while not mentioning that the 900lb Gorilla in the room that dwarfs Google. Lets pit Google's tech presence against Microsoft. First and foremost, Google's services (out side of Android) are all delivered over the web, an ubititous platform with a very low cost of entry. Ubiquity means that users have a lot of choice without having to large barriers to move across. That can't be said about Microsoft who has a much tighter grip on 98% of your life and data. Microsoft still enters more and more sectors within tech without a peep from the government. Does the worlds largest OS software company, the worlds largest office productivity company, the worlds largest online email provider ALSO need to be competing in Search, Virtualization, Anti-virus, Remote Meeting, Databases, Cloud, etc etc ad infinitum? If Google is expanding into every direction its in response to being frightened by only having one lifeline (search) and seeing that the true juggernaut is hell-bent on dominating it. What is most important to the future of all technology is that at least two super powers exist. As long as their is a strong Google, Microsoft will have to respect customers choice and innovate. And vice versa is also true. So if your going to split anyone up because their too big to fail, the obvious choice is M$ ft.
"Google" + "too big to fail". Whatever...
Don't depend on Google and it isn't TBTF.
If every Google server exploded today, the gap would be filled for utilitarian services very quickly. Entertainment is a trifle and there are ample redundant sources for that.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
That's what she said.
So after 10+ years in business, critics are finally worried that all of Google's revenue comes from just advertisements? I was wondering when people would start to put that out there.
Nearly all of it comes from advertising,' he frets. 'That's what pays for all the infrastructure Google is giving to the rest of us.
It comes as no surprise that his blog / Linux Journal is using adsense.
The word "portable" when an application is in the conversation has little to nothing to do with placement on this planet. I'm sure you realize this, you're simply being a sarcastic asshat.
OS-agnostic is what is meant by portable. Don't even try to skew that definition.
Odd too that the blog is flanked with ads by Google.
Reply to That ||
What? Losing almost $2 million dollars a day, year after year? It's a terrible idea. They lost billions on YouTube, developed the "want" for people to watch online video, and now NetFlix and Hulu are the ones profiting from it.
Normally it's the 800 pound gorilla that lets the smaller monkeys take the risks of developing the market, then moves in and crushes them with its greater weight. I think Google needs to hire some more ex-Microsofties.
So, tell me again how my mail isn't portable.
Rather, Dave Winer is considered too stupid for us to read the click-bait drivel he throws up on his blog.
How the fuck is your comment "insightful"?!
You ethnocentric bastard.
There's a famous quote, "The graveyards are full of indispensable men."
I'm surprised more of them weren't cremated with the share certificates from the ventures they founded. Buried right beside them are the alcoholics who bet their future comfort on the wrong horse. Of course, that was before the invention of spare livers.
Unfortunately, this phrase suffers the usual semantic debasement in the shallow minds of the harried until it often means "without that fellow around, I'd actually have to show up and earn my living". Ask any plantation owner. Paradoxically, nothing boosts productivity like an indispensable head rolling down a splintered plank, so beware of second-order effects.
For some reason, my warning bells go off whenever Dave Winer enters the conversation.
It might be a mistake to define Google's business model so narrowly as advertising. There are broader perspectives on this ecosystem.
Munger on Middlemen
Amazing that Winer inherently proposes replacing the existing N:1 + 1:M model with an N:M model. When does that ever work? Middlemen exist for a reason. Is Winer's position that not tantamount to claiming that corporations will evolve to bypass the stock exchange and go direct to the shareholder? Why should NASDAQ take a cut of the pie? Parasites, all of them.
I don't get how the corporations are going to actively "come to me". I've mostly locked my work process down so that this can't happen. Direct telephone marketers still make my phone ring despite fierce efforts to the contrary. Hope the telcos are enjoying the Google rope trick. Hard to think of an industry more deserving of an internal-rope keel-hauling.
From Google's perspective, I've long thought that monetizing clicks was a perilous revenue model. I've never suspected that Google's security as the world's ultimate middleman was in any real jeopardy. There could be interesting ahead times if Google has to reinvent their revenue generation model from their position of power.
One guess is that Google ends up creating a user-pay micro-payment model for *highly* customized search results, exploiting semantic data-mining on a scope only possible to an organization sitting on 10^18 bytes of storage.
Or you can sit there and perform a hundred Google searches by hand to piece the same results together yourself. They don't have to take that away. What's your time worth? If you're in the group who never clicks on ads, your time is probably of enough value to expedite progress.
If you think Google is vulnerable on this front, good luck with your efforts to raise venture capital to compete against them. They've got an exabyte head start. Make sure your prospectus includes a good explanation of the zetta scale and the need to arrive their to achieve financial victory. You don't want to be busted by the stock exchange for deluding old ladies. First stop on your direct sales pitch should be Dave Winer. He's already declared himself sympathetic on two separate fronts. No wait, I forgot, Winer believes in an N:M routing around the leviathan with no interior infrastructure. Whew, that sure beats having to compete.
Let me put it another way: It might be the case that the price of Google for Domains pays for the maintenance of the Google for Domains version of one of Google's web apps. But until one of these apps shows up on Google for Domains before it shows up on the public, ad-supported Google, we can assume that the initial development was supported by the ads.
How many organizations pay for google for domains? It started as a 25-user cap, but they will up the free limit to 100 just for asking. I don't think they are charging educational institutions either.
Likewise, how many search appliances do they sell, or any of their fee-based services? They don't make a dent in revenue.
As a stockholder, I wish they could capitalize on more than just advertising, but haven't seen it yet.
s/arrive their/arrive there/
Note to self: bad brain, bad. If I cut off the offending finger, will the other nine fingers work twice as hard?
That would be my right index finger. The "i" can be replaced with "1", commas can be replaced w1th sem1-colons; and it's long been overdue to cnaccer the letter "k". The angle-braccet / less-than symbol 1s the tough one 1n the group. Don't see how ! can l1ve w1thout that. So ! guess r1ght 1ndex f1nger 1s a ceeper; border1ng on 1nd1spens1ble.
We do.
You can't have a signature automatically appended to all emails unless you pay. And putting your registered company number and address on all correspondence is a legal requirement in the EU.
There are one or two other features you get if you're a paying customer, though that was the main one for us. AFAICT, the features you have to pay for are by and large features which would only appeal to businesses.
heck many users probably don't even know wiki's url, i just type "wiki [subject]" in the ol google search bar and i'm there.
no bailout: certain collapse
bailout: possible collapse
see how that fucking works?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The social security trust fund is a big fat joke.
All the surplus was invested in government bonds that were sold to pay off the interest on the national debt!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ziQuxyK4Ck
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-01-26/davos-too-big-to-fail-as-bankers-recoil-in-political-backlash.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/26/business/economy/26big.html NY Times
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124528373595925623.html WSJ 2009 before the crash
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinionla/la-oew-ikenson-wial4-2009jun04,0,4807351.story June '09 before the crash
Forgive the formatting, but it's Saturday AM and I went drinking with my sons yesterday.
Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it.
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
Do you think if Google fails that the search engine is just going to disappear? Or GMail? No, they'll be sold to the highest bidder to pay Google's debts, but they won't themselves be liquidated. Life will go on for the rest of us.
Relax, and stop screwing with the market already. If they make dumb business decisions, let them fail. There are mechanisms in place to deal with that.
Saturn was unionized (albeit with a slightly different contract at Spring Hill) and never made a profit the entire time it operated.
--srj/mmv