Next time you ride the subway look around. Look at the facial expression of the people you see around you. How many are looking happy?
OK riding the subway is no fun you say. True. Still someone should be happy for whatever reason? So happy that they're still smiling when training for sardine-to-be-canned?
Now redo this experiment on the streets. Still you just won't see many smiles around. For some reason people are not happy, are never happy. They look neutral at best, many look negative. Angry, bored, depressed - anything but happy. \
You see the same in these images. Smiles are rare.
More sensible: wipe and re-install them every night. Or every few hours even, depending on how heavily customers tinker with it and try to change settings. As an Apple store you'd likely want your display models to look like Steve Jobs wants them to look.
The store may be privately owned, but I've always considered the open areas of a store "public area". The door is open, anyone may walk in. They can not restrict it to "whites only" for example.
However for making recordings, like CCTV, at least where I live the premises must have a conspicuous sign informing visitors that such recordings take place - I'd wager that's the same in the US. This photo-taking may well fall under such video surveillance. Though as it's a shop selling expensive stuff I wouldn't be surprised if they have CCTV installed already. So for that matter I think his argument on being allowed to take photos is valid. Whether he should ask explicit permission to publish them, that's another matter, I really don't know. If you take a photo on the street and someone happens to be walking around in the background, you're fine. But in this case the person is the subject of the photo.
And then the installation of software: he apparently didn't ask permission for that, and if so, that's stupid. While those display computers may provide access for people who want to play with them a bit, and there probably are not written rules posted with them what you can and what you can not do with them, common sense should prevail here. Installing your own software on such computers without explicit permission is a bridge too far.
A reason for me to buy that particular model (an LG 500P) was that it was about half price of an iPhone... now surely iPhone has the better hardware (particularly screen resolution), but at least I can swap out my battery, and really need so when I go out a day geocaching - GPS eats battery badly!
I think your aunt is much closer to the average user than you are... this as most/. users are power users.
And just out of curiousity: how many of those were paid and how many free? The site I linked to mentions that while 3 out of 4 apps on the market are paid apps, 3 out of 4 downloads are free apps.
Personally I'm a cheapskate Android user; the two dozen or so apps that I have installed are all free. I've yet to pay for an app. The required registration for that is an objection to me.
200 million iOS users have downloaded over 15 billion apps from its App Store
That equates to an average of 75 downloads per iOS user. That's a lot.
Now I have no idea how many apps a typical iOS user has installed on their phone, but if it's half that I'd be surprised. So sure there are many updates included in this number.
This site has some more statistics on the app's value and prices paid (no idea on the reliability of these numbers, other than that they sound altogether plausible to me). They claim that the average payment amount per app (averaging in the free apps!) is $0.91. TFA mentions a total of $2.5b paid out to developers, which is 70% of the price a user pays, so $3.6b total revenue. This results in about 4 billion total app downloads, or more like 20 per iOS user. An already much more reasonable sounding number. And that also means 11 billion (an average of almost three per installed app) are updates.
Indeed, in this case I have to agree fully with Microsoft. That doesn't happen so often.
Of course no botnet is indestructible. Nothing is indestructible. Microsoft themselves are not indestructible, our planet is not indestructible. They're just really strong. Same accounts apparently for this new botnet. It's strong: hides itself really well, uses decentralised command and control, etc. Probably it doesn't even incorporate all weapons botnet makers have at their disposal, and their arsenal is growing. Like the arsenal of the anti-malware makers as well, of course.
As there is nothing centralised, you will have to go after individual nodes. And there is probably no automatic way possible (well not legally/morally at least) to do this. Though I would expect there can be ways to find a technical solution to detect the presense of this piece of malware, and with it to clean it up, node by node. But it will be really hard.
One of the ways this may be blocked at a higher level would be on an ISP level to monitor traffic to and from subscribers, and filtering out suspected traffic (e.g. blocking the IP port the malware uses to communicate; or if that's a common one like 80 use deep packet inspection to stop botnet traffic). Though that has quite some other legal and moral issues related to it, of course.
I just checked myself: Facebook by default enables the "Anyone can view and RSVP (public event)" option. That should be disabled by default. It is easy enough to forget to untick that one... type your birthday invitation, when you're done mum calls "dinner's ready!", quickly finish up, click "post", off to dinner.
It's just plainly ridiculous that an event is public by default. And I'm sure that's a major part of the cause of these unintended mass parties. Now if Facebook becomes more sensible in these matters, then I'm all for your ideas. Until then, Facebook is definitely one to carry part of the blame.
Germany could implement a law that by default parties are "Invite only" and "Guests may not invite people."
The sad thing is that laws could be needed for that... while this simply are the only reasonable defaults for an event for publication on a site like Facebook. With making it any more open preferably only possible after posting the event, by having to explicitly change related options. Maybe not convenient, but preventing a lot of trouble.
Isn't there something like a "grant report" that comes with the granted patent, that explicitly lists which bits and pieces were found to be novel, and what the patent is granted upon? Would make life a lot easier for many people. And the examiner must have read it all, and figured out the novel bits, already.
TFA already mentions that there is a great likelihood to invalidated these two patents based on prior art.
After reading this article, I started to wonder. Now they sued right away, it seems without even informing potential infringers that they were infringing on the patent, let alone trying to negotiate an out-of-court deal with them.
These patents were in the making since 2007, that's enough time to at least warn infringing manufacturers that their method of cooling was patent pending, and that they may have to make changes.
The questions that I have about this tactic of the patent holder:
From what time can they claim damages? From the date of application? From the date of issue of the patent (just two months now)? Or from the moment the infringing manufacturers were notified of the issue?
If they claim damages on a technology that was for sale at the time the patent was applied for, I think that could automatically invalidate the patent as prior art. And if they claim damages from the moment the patent was issued or the infringers were notified, not much to get, as that's pretty much "now".
And what do the courts think of this "sue first" strategy? Do they accept the case, or will they kick them out with the message "start negotiating first, and if you can not come to an agreement you may come back to us"? I think courts to be a "necessary evil" and as such a last resort to settle disputes after direct negotiations failed. It's to me not where they should complain about the alleged infringement first.
Poor comparison. Speaker cables carry analog signals, so cable quality matters a lot more than for digital like HDMI. Especially if you go high-end, cables really matter.
I've seen that before (and UK is far from the safest country in the EU).
Safer roads while European countries there are more cars per km of road than in the US, higher highway speeds (usually limits of 110-130 km/hr or even no limit like in Germany) than in the US, and narrower roads (the latter according to US drivers that were driving in Netherlands and being so scared of our "narrow" roads!), I'd say Europe is doing something right there.
And that probably also includes the driving courses.
I would argue against that by savings in installation/maintenance of the lights, and possibly seriously reduced cost for police, ambulance and fire services due to the reduction in accidents. I can't imagine fines give so much extra income to make up for that (especially after deduction of cost of issuing the fines, and prosecuting non-payers).
At least in The Netherlands some roundabouts are built because they reduce speeds at intersections. Making the road safer. And making it generally easier/faster and definitely safer for traffic coming in from the side road to merge on to the main road - without the need of traffic lights that stop a couple dozen cars just to let one car in.
For some reason, roundabout sounds like something specifically designed for cars. Yet there weren't that many of those around back in 1791 - I would guess the number to be pretty close to "none". Even 100 years ago there weren't that many - the Ford Model T is just over 100 years old, and is (one of) the first mass produced cars. With mass having far lower numbers than it has now.
While it is possible that they had roundabouts for horse-and-carriage, I'd love to see some reference. That must be a really interesting sight!
The whole Android system itself is platform independent - you can install Android on an Intel netbook (I have seen netbooks in the shops that are dual booting Android and Windows). So why emulate an ARM processor? Totally doesn't make sense.
What you're emulating here is an operating environment, where the underlying hardware is actually irrelevant: you pretend to have a GPS (the developer can actually tell the GPS which coordinates to send to the app in the emulator, or to not have a fix, etc) , a WiFi connection (you can connect your device to the Internet via WiFi or 3G in the emulator), etc. Just like VirtualBox that pretends to have hardware network interfaces and so.
So they call it an "emulator" but I think what they actually do is some kind of "virtualisation". You emulate hardware but you have to emulate it only to a certain extent as you don't run native ARM-compiled software on it, it's all Java code.
As I mentioned already in the comment, some people have the problem, others not. You're apparently one of the lucky ones.
That my machine is a relative old single-processor (I guess 1.8 GHz, not sure) machine should not be a problem; the same app is running on my phone at good speed, and that's a 600 MHz ARM processor! Windows in VirtualBox is also running fine, and that definitely requires more heavy-lifting than emulating Android (after all they don't HAVE to emulate the processor, as it's all Java code, which is processor-independent). And it's not that I'm running an esoteric OS, it's just a recent Ubuntu.
There is something else that's in the way of proper performance. But what it could be... no idea.
That is something that in a way surprises me. I mean not to say Google is the greatest ever, but I do expect better from them than putting out such a poor performing emulator. Android itself performs well, their Chrome browser is also known for being speedy, then why can they not get this emulator to work at a decent speed?!
You and me have this speed problem, when I searched for possible solutions I found many other people have it, while others are using the emulator just fine (or so they claim).
Their Eclipse plug-in works well, makes development/debugging quite easy. But that emulator... such an important tool for being able to just test your stuff on other screen sizes (see whether it scales somewhat nicely)... it just doesn't work. And as a result I've never seen my own app on a different resolution than my phone's.
Platform fragmentation - as in, different screen sizes etc., may be an issue but I don't know how bad it really is.
I'm developing an Android app; doing it exclusively on my own device; have tried the emulator but it is so slow! Takes some 10-15 minutes just to start up, and then literally minutes to start running my app after starting it out of Eclipse. Not to mention the sluggish performance in the emulator. Searching for solutions to this problem only resulted in many hits of people with the same problem.
So while I'd love to at least test my app on the "big screen", or even smaller screens for that sake (my device is double the minimum required), the shitty emulator makes it impossible.
This I can imagine will hold back many developers to optimise their app for the tablets, as it'd require them to buy the device. And if only that emulator would work properly I'd prefer to use it instead of my device, easier!
Google are clearly winning here - all the browsers have significantly improved their javascript performance and standards compliance since Chrome made them start competing again.
I'd say browser competition was quite hot already with Firefox taking over a huge chunk of IE's market, and Safari being released for Windows. Chrome just heated it up a bit more.
And anyway that's a great thing I'd say. I'd love to see a world with 3, 4 major browsers, each having at least some 15-20% market share, no more than 50% for any single one. That forces them to follow standards as it's too much to expect web developers to develop browser-specific. Actually considering the latest browser usage statistics we're quite close to such an "ideal world" already.
But your examples of copying are not zero sum. Android is valuable despite copying the iPhone, it's different enough, and more importantly it grows the market in a way that Apple wasn't going to.
That was a new market. Banks, insurances, Microsoft all operate in a more-or-less saturated market. Big difference. Android can grow alongside iPhone. Linux can only grow by taking market share from other companies like Microsoft, and thus threatening Microsoft directly.
War doesn't have to be zero sum either. If it's a war over land and resources then yes, but if it's a war over political ideals then no.
War tends to be a negative-sum business. Remember: war has no winners, only losers. The "winner" is just the one that lost less.
There are basically two ways to make money on the Internet: advertising, and having users pay for the service. This not counting "e-commerce" sites, which are basically not different from a traditional mail-order service with an online instead of a paper catalogue.
These days, many services are free, they are of high quality, users have come to expect such services to be free, and most are not willing to pay for it.
E-mail service: hotmal/gmail/yahoo/etc are all free, have always been, will always be. Can't make money there other than by advertising.
Social networking: Facebook/MySpace/LinkedIn/etc are free, have always been, will always be. Can't make money there other than by advertising.
Search engines: AltaVista/Yahoo/Bing/Google are free, have always been, will always be. Can't make money there other than by advertising.
Slashdot is free (OK you can become paid member but not many do so). Main income is definitely from advertising - including advertising their own geek products.
And so you can go on. There are so many services available online, and most of them are available for free.
Looking back at the past decade or two, many many companies were set up (most went bust) with a free service, and the only real goal being to get as many users as possible, without business plan. Other than maybe a vague idea of advertising to those users, but often even that didn't take off well, though at the time that may have had to do more with lack of interest from advertisers. This market has matured significantly now.
Google brings out all those free services (e.g. maps with street view - the latter must cost a lot to create), with the sole purpose of attracting users, and to create new platforms for more and more targeted advertising. And many users seem to appreciate targeted advertising: when looking for coffee shops for example, it can be useful to see ads of coffee shops that are near you. Valuable advertising for those coffee shops involved as well.
The advantage Google has is not just advertising, it is that they have a complete up-and-running, well developed network of targeted advertising. They have the advertisers already. They have technology to decide which ads may be relevant to that user. And that is something a startup doesn't have yet. So a startup not only has to develop a product, they have to develop the income source, and they have to develop a name for themselves, something Google has already, they're one of the best-known brands on the Internet.
Slashdot Mirror
Next time you ride the subway look around. Look at the facial expression of the people you see around you. How many are looking happy?
OK riding the subway is no fun you say. True. Still someone should be happy for whatever reason? So happy that they're still smiling when training for sardine-to-be-canned?
Now redo this experiment on the streets. Still you just won't see many smiles around. For some reason people are not happy, are never happy. They look neutral at best, many look negative. Angry, bored, depressed - anything but happy. \
You see the same in these images. Smiles are rare.
More sensible: wipe and re-install them every night. Or every few hours even, depending on how heavily customers tinker with it and try to change settings. As an Apple store you'd likely want your display models to look like Steve Jobs wants them to look.
The store may be privately owned, but I've always considered the open areas of a store "public area". The door is open, anyone may walk in. They can not restrict it to "whites only" for example.
However for making recordings, like CCTV, at least where I live the premises must have a conspicuous sign informing visitors that such recordings take place - I'd wager that's the same in the US. This photo-taking may well fall under such video surveillance. Though as it's a shop selling expensive stuff I wouldn't be surprised if they have CCTV installed already. So for that matter I think his argument on being allowed to take photos is valid. Whether he should ask explicit permission to publish them, that's another matter, I really don't know. If you take a photo on the street and someone happens to be walking around in the background, you're fine. But in this case the person is the subject of the photo.
And then the installation of software: he apparently didn't ask permission for that, and if so, that's stupid. While those display computers may provide access for people who want to play with them a bit, and there probably are not written rules posted with them what you can and what you can not do with them, common sense should prevail here. Installing your own software on such computers without explicit permission is a bridge too far.
A reason for me to buy that particular model (an LG 500P) was that it was about half price of an iPhone... now surely iPhone has the better hardware (particularly screen resolution), but at least I can swap out my battery, and really need so when I go out a day geocaching - GPS eats battery badly!
I think your aunt is much closer to the average user than you are... this as most /. users are power users.
And just out of curiousity: how many of those were paid and how many free? The site I linked to mentions that while 3 out of 4 apps on the market are paid apps, 3 out of 4 downloads are free apps.
Personally I'm a cheapskate Android user; the two dozen or so apps that I have installed are all free. I've yet to pay for an app. The required registration for that is an objection to me.
First line of TFA:
200 million iOS users have downloaded over 15 billion apps from its App Store
That equates to an average of 75 downloads per iOS user. That's a lot.
Now I have no idea how many apps a typical iOS user has installed on their phone, but if it's half that I'd be surprised. So sure there are many updates included in this number.
This site has some more statistics on the app's value and prices paid (no idea on the reliability of these numbers, other than that they sound altogether plausible to me). They claim that the average payment amount per app (averaging in the free apps!) is $0.91. TFA mentions a total of $2.5b paid out to developers, which is 70% of the price a user pays, so $3.6b total revenue. This results in about 4 billion total app downloads, or more like 20 per iOS user. An already much more reasonable sounding number. And that also means 11 billion (an average of almost three per installed app) are updates.
Indeed, in this case I have to agree fully with Microsoft. That doesn't happen so often.
Of course no botnet is indestructible. Nothing is indestructible. Microsoft themselves are not indestructible, our planet is not indestructible. They're just really strong. Same accounts apparently for this new botnet. It's strong: hides itself really well, uses decentralised command and control, etc. Probably it doesn't even incorporate all weapons botnet makers have at their disposal, and their arsenal is growing. Like the arsenal of the anti-malware makers as well, of course.
As there is nothing centralised, you will have to go after individual nodes. And there is probably no automatic way possible (well not legally/morally at least) to do this. Though I would expect there can be ways to find a technical solution to detect the presense of this piece of malware, and with it to clean it up, node by node. But it will be really hard.
One of the ways this may be blocked at a higher level would be on an ISP level to monitor traffic to and from subscribers, and filtering out suspected traffic (e.g. blocking the IP port the malware uses to communicate; or if that's a common one like 80 use deep packet inspection to stop botnet traffic). Though that has quite some other legal and moral issues related to it, of course.
I just checked myself: Facebook by default enables the "Anyone can view and RSVP (public event)" option. That should be disabled by default. It is easy enough to forget to untick that one... type your birthday invitation, when you're done mum calls "dinner's ready!", quickly finish up, click "post", off to dinner.
It's just plainly ridiculous that an event is public by default. And I'm sure that's a major part of the cause of these unintended mass parties. Now if Facebook becomes more sensible in these matters, then I'm all for your ideas. Until then, Facebook is definitely one to carry part of the blame.
Germany could implement a law that by default parties are "Invite only" and "Guests may not invite people."
The sad thing is that laws could be needed for that... while this simply are the only reasonable defaults for an event for publication on a site like Facebook. With making it any more open preferably only possible after posting the event, by having to explicitly change related options. Maybe not convenient, but preventing a lot of trouble.
Isn't there something like a "grant report" that comes with the granted patent, that explicitly lists which bits and pieces were found to be novel, and what the patent is granted upon? Would make life a lot easier for many people. And the examiner must have read it all, and figured out the novel bits, already.
TFA already mentions that there is a great likelihood to invalidated these two patents based on prior art.
After reading this article, I started to wonder. Now they sued right away, it seems without even informing potential infringers that they were infringing on the patent, let alone trying to negotiate an out-of-court deal with them.
These patents were in the making since 2007, that's enough time to at least warn infringing manufacturers that their method of cooling was patent pending, and that they may have to make changes.
The questions that I have about this tactic of the patent holder:
From what time can they claim damages? From the date of application? From the date of issue of the patent (just two months now)? Or from the moment the infringing manufacturers were notified of the issue?
If they claim damages on a technology that was for sale at the time the patent was applied for, I think that could automatically invalidate the patent as prior art. And if they claim damages from the moment the patent was issued or the infringers were notified, not much to get, as that's pretty much "now".
And what do the courts think of this "sue first" strategy? Do they accept the case, or will they kick them out with the message "start negotiating first, and if you can not come to an agreement you may come back to us"? I think courts to be a "necessary evil" and as such a last resort to settle disputes after direct negotiations failed. It's to me not where they should complain about the alleged infringement first.
Poor comparison. Speaker cables carry analog signals, so cable quality matters a lot more than for digital like HDMI. Especially if you go high-end, cables really matter.
I've seen that before (and UK is far from the safest country in the EU).
Safer roads while European countries there are more cars per km of road than in the US, higher highway speeds (usually limits of 110-130 km/hr or even no limit like in Germany) than in the US, and narrower roads (the latter according to US drivers that were driving in Netherlands and being so scared of our "narrow" roads!), I'd say Europe is doing something right there.
And that probably also includes the driving courses.
Intersting argument.
I would argue against that by savings in installation/maintenance of the lights, and possibly seriously reduced cost for police, ambulance and fire services due to the reduction in accidents. I can't imagine fines give so much extra income to make up for that (especially after deduction of cost of issuing the fines, and prosecuting non-payers).
At least in The Netherlands some roundabouts are built because they reduce speeds at intersections. Making the road safer. And making it generally easier/faster and definitely safer for traffic coming in from the side road to merge on to the main road - without the need of traffic lights that stop a couple dozen cars just to let one car in.
For some reason, roundabout sounds like something specifically designed for cars. Yet there weren't that many of those around back in 1791 - I would guess the number to be pretty close to "none". Even 100 years ago there weren't that many - the Ford Model T is just over 100 years old, and is (one of) the first mass produced cars. With mass having far lower numbers than it has now.
While it is possible that they had roundabouts for horse-and-carriage, I'd love to see some reference. That must be a really interesting sight!
That while Android runs on Intel just as well... dual booting with Windows!
The whole Android system itself is platform independent - you can install Android on an Intel netbook (I have seen netbooks in the shops that are dual booting Android and Windows). So why emulate an ARM processor? Totally doesn't make sense.
What you're emulating here is an operating environment, where the underlying hardware is actually irrelevant: you pretend to have a GPS (the developer can actually tell the GPS which coordinates to send to the app in the emulator, or to not have a fix, etc) , a WiFi connection (you can connect your device to the Internet via WiFi or 3G in the emulator), etc. Just like VirtualBox that pretends to have hardware network interfaces and so.
So they call it an "emulator" but I think what they actually do is some kind of "virtualisation". You emulate hardware but you have to emulate it only to a certain extent as you don't run native ARM-compiled software on it, it's all Java code.
It's out in the wild, but unfortunately no chance for me (yet) to see it on other devices. Yet the comments that I get on design are very positive.
As I mentioned already in the comment, some people have the problem, others not. You're apparently one of the lucky ones.
That my machine is a relative old single-processor (I guess 1.8 GHz, not sure) machine should not be a problem; the same app is running on my phone at good speed, and that's a 600 MHz ARM processor! Windows in VirtualBox is also running fine, and that definitely requires more heavy-lifting than emulating Android (after all they don't HAVE to emulate the processor, as it's all Java code, which is processor-independent). And it's not that I'm running an esoteric OS, it's just a recent Ubuntu.
There is something else that's in the way of proper performance. But what it could be... no idea.
That is something that in a way surprises me. I mean not to say Google is the greatest ever, but I do expect better from them than putting out such a poor performing emulator. Android itself performs well, their Chrome browser is also known for being speedy, then why can they not get this emulator to work at a decent speed?!
You and me have this speed problem, when I searched for possible solutions I found many other people have it, while others are using the emulator just fine (or so they claim).
Their Eclipse plug-in works well, makes development/debugging quite easy. But that emulator... such an important tool for being able to just test your stuff on other screen sizes (see whether it scales somewhat nicely)... it just doesn't work. And as a result I've never seen my own app on a different resolution than my phone's.
Platform fragmentation - as in, different screen sizes etc., may be an issue but I don't know how bad it really is.
I'm developing an Android app; doing it exclusively on my own device; have tried the emulator but it is so slow! Takes some 10-15 minutes just to start up, and then literally minutes to start running my app after starting it out of Eclipse. Not to mention the sluggish performance in the emulator. Searching for solutions to this problem only resulted in many hits of people with the same problem.
So while I'd love to at least test my app on the "big screen", or even smaller screens for that sake (my device is double the minimum required), the shitty emulator makes it impossible.
This I can imagine will hold back many developers to optimise their app for the tablets, as it'd require them to buy the device. And if only that emulator would work properly I'd prefer to use it instead of my device, easier!
Google are clearly winning here - all the browsers have significantly improved their javascript performance and standards compliance since Chrome made them start competing again.
I'd say browser competition was quite hot already with Firefox taking over a huge chunk of IE's market, and Safari being released for Windows. Chrome just heated it up a bit more.
And anyway that's a great thing I'd say. I'd love to see a world with 3, 4 major browsers, each having at least some 15-20% market share, no more than 50% for any single one. That forces them to follow standards as it's too much to expect web developers to develop browser-specific. Actually considering the latest browser usage statistics we're quite close to such an "ideal world" already.
But your examples of copying are not zero sum. Android is valuable despite copying the iPhone, it's different enough, and more importantly it grows the market in a way that Apple wasn't going to.
That was a new market. Banks, insurances, Microsoft all operate in a more-or-less saturated market. Big difference. Android can grow alongside iPhone. Linux can only grow by taking market share from other companies like Microsoft, and thus threatening Microsoft directly.
War doesn't have to be zero sum either. If it's a war over land and resources then yes, but if it's a war over political ideals then no.
War tends to be a negative-sum business. Remember: war has no winners, only losers. The "winner" is just the one that lost less.
There are basically two ways to make money on the Internet: advertising, and having users pay for the service. This not counting "e-commerce" sites, which are basically not different from a traditional mail-order service with an online instead of a paper catalogue.
These days, many services are free, they are of high quality, users have come to expect such services to be free, and most are not willing to pay for it.
E-mail service: hotmal/gmail/yahoo/etc are all free, have always been, will always be. Can't make money there other than by advertising.
Social networking: Facebook/MySpace/LinkedIn/etc are free, have always been, will always be. Can't make money there other than by advertising.
Search engines: AltaVista/Yahoo/Bing/Google are free, have always been, will always be. Can't make money there other than by advertising.
Slashdot is free (OK you can become paid member but not many do so). Main income is definitely from advertising - including advertising their own geek products.
And so you can go on. There are so many services available online, and most of them are available for free.
Looking back at the past decade or two, many many companies were set up (most went bust) with a free service, and the only real goal being to get as many users as possible, without business plan. Other than maybe a vague idea of advertising to those users, but often even that didn't take off well, though at the time that may have had to do more with lack of interest from advertisers. This market has matured significantly now.
Google brings out all those free services (e.g. maps with street view - the latter must cost a lot to create), with the sole purpose of attracting users, and to create new platforms for more and more targeted advertising. And many users seem to appreciate targeted advertising: when looking for coffee shops for example, it can be useful to see ads of coffee shops that are near you. Valuable advertising for those coffee shops involved as well.
The advantage Google has is not just advertising, it is that they have a complete up-and-running, well developed network of targeted advertising. They have the advertisers already. They have technology to decide which ads may be relevant to that user. And that is something a startup doesn't have yet. So a startup not only has to develop a product, they have to develop the income source, and they have to develop a name for themselves, something Google has already, they're one of the best-known brands on the Internet.