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by netcan 1614 days ago
Whatever is going on with the >$1trn club's ideas for cracking that next ceiling... it's all quite opaque.

"Let a thousand flowers bloom" failed, but at least we had a grasp of what's going on. It was a bet on the, now known to be false idea that the web economy would have horizontal breadth. Turned out that (a) ads had a lot of death and (b) Google didn't manage to create any alternative revenue streams worth noting.

Now they all seem to be eyeing off anything that looks like it has $trn potential. That's a pretty finite pool.

Crypto is wild and chaotic. If a handful of big companies take it over, it'll be more orderly and ostensibly accountable. Traditional finance is pretty ugly, and we won't miss Citibank, JPM and such but...

Goddamn these bigshots and their sense of title to the world. I hope they lose.
2 comments
axg11 1614 days ago
How can you honestly say the "let a thousand flowers bloom" approach failed? Google scraps a lot of products, but they still have many great products: Gmail/GSuite, Android, YouTube, GCP, Nest...

Each of those is a successful tech company in their own right.

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netcan 1614 days ago
>>Each of those is a successful tech company in their own right.

I disagree. None are another revenue stream. Android/YouTube/etc pull a low of weight for the AdWords business but (a) those were acquisitions and (b) they don't have a business model "in their own right."

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JofArnold 1614 days ago
~Gmail: acquisition~ EDIT: nope, I remembered wrong; PB did it while at Google.

GSuite: a product of several acquisitions

Android: acquisition

YouTube: acquisition

Nest: acquisition

Sure, they may have improved them. But definitely not spawned from blooming flowers.

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sundarurfriend 1614 days ago
> Gmail: acquisition

Wasn't Gmail someone's 20%-time project, within Google?

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JofArnold 1614 days ago
You're right! PB! I'll correct
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suprfsat 1614 days ago
Ah yes, Google Wallet, I mean Pay, is nothing if not "orderly" and "accountable".
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Kon-Peki 1614 days ago
According to page 40 of the survey linked in [1] two weeks ago, 4 times as many American teenagers write checks vs using Google Pay. Going all in on blockchain makes it into a less-bad joke than it already is.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29817807

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