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by aqwsedopl 2688 days ago
Microsoft’s bias towards windows stunted it’s growth severely. It seems googles bias towards its ad-revenue based models is something similar.

Specifically, googles inability to adopt a customer-service oriented mindset and customer-privacy will be its end. Is search really it’s core strength anymore? I’d think it’s more it’s ability to reindex in a day and filter out spam.

Fundamentally, as long as google offers free services funded by converting its user data into anonymous normal distributions to be sold, I don’t think google will ever be able to overcome its stigma as a non privacy focused company. I don’t care how many privacy menu settings or SPA control panels it offers. It’s like asking if fb is ever going to be trustworthy.. haha

When a new company scales out a better search algorithm updates as fast as google... on top of aws infrastructure.. that would be interesting

I wonder what is amazons weakness that will be its undoing

It’s been ten years.. still waiting for google to give me a reliable customer service phone number on the quality of amazons.. heck I’m still waiting for google to offer a user service where I know it won’t just die or change 180 arbitrarily. I think it’s a little too late by now. Does the general public even trust in google being a secure, reliable company? Doesn’t seem that way imho

3 comments

Specifically, googles inability to adopt a customer-service oriented mindset and customer-privacy will be its end. Is search really it’s core strength anymore? I’d think it’s more it’s ability to reindex in a day and filter out spam.

I thought the core business was vacuuming up personal data for ad-targeting resale purposes?

I would love for them to actually a nicer tech company that offers services like GCP and leaves the rest of us alone. Cynically, one wonders how the idea made it past a whiteboard in a meeting, where probably someone was very interested in how they could do some ML on the data coming in and out. Not saying they do (or even could) do this, only that this seems the core business model.

Interesting. Its hard to see them giving up their biggest source of revenue, but thats a good point: GCP could possibly be their next killer-app allowing them to rely less on the personal data vacuuming they're infamous for.
"Microsoft's bias towards Windows?"

Microsoft was one of the first major developers for the Mac when it came out originally.

Microsoft is happy for you to run Linux in the Azure cloud. Microsoft added Linux emulation to Windows. Microsoft gave up on Windows Phone (if only because Verizon and AT&T refused to approve new Windows Phones on their networks.)

You’re missing 1996-2013 in Microsoft history.

A story that Microsoft honchos loved to tell was that some VIP dared to meet with Steve Ballmer and showed him something on his iPhone. I think the moral of the story is that Microsoft had changed at the time because Ballmer was insulted, but didn’t toss a chair at the guy.

The not invented here syndrome at that company is/was amazing. Microsoft wasn’t as bad as IBM, but they were on that path!

Microsoft does all of that now, but ~6-8 years ago when the initial cloud pushes were happening they most certainly weren't.
Playing half a decade to a decade of catchup built on a war chest of windows and office b2b sales does not instill much confidence ...
Finally, I posit that the app ecosystem, specifically that in iOS, is the killer weapon apple holds against google. Apple literally has infinite source of free developers who can crank out apps rivaling the quality of googles free offerings... all for less than ten dollars an app. iCloudsync has mostly killed google docs and google drives cloud sync advantage across the board. Apples app ecosystem literally is infinitely horizontally scalable, while googles app ecosystem can’t even offer competent customer service for five core apps.. hmmmm I wonder who will win. Ironically parts of iCloud sync are probably using a aws for sure and maybe even google cloud as backbone.