[Kamq]

> Risk-averse to cannibalizing existing revenue

I think this is the big one. The other ones are dangerous, but I don't think they're an existential threat to google.

Not wanting to take a hit to existing revenue, however, is the same impulse that resulted in Kodak sitting on digital photography instead of becoming a pioneer in the field.

[joe_the_user]

Sure, Risk-averse to cannibalizing existing revenue is a standard problem for any market leader and someone competing with Google could be nice.

But in this case, nothing prevents and everything points to Google, an AI leader, presenting it's results in a more chatty format - but still with links and advertising.

The thing is, Open AI didn't wheel out the very impressive ChatGPT because they had found a way to search more cheaply than Google. They brought out their thing 'cause it was impressive and earlier effort actually monetize the already impressive GPT-3 essentially failed and they're spending quite a bit giving many, many people easy access to their tech. This is what happens when a company doesn't have a business model - give stuff away to get attention 'till you figure things out - sometimes it works, it worked for Google when they were getting started. But it's harder when what you're selling isn't cheaper, just slicker and when your competition has a strong business model.

[edgyquant]

Yeah plus Google had a huge edge they should have been preparing to weather any short term damages to revenue etc and kept innovating on what they were good at.

[chefandy]

My circa 15 year ago experience as an IBMer had that vibe. Press-release-innovative but operationally a lumbering bureaucracy bending over backwards to cater to their fellow lumbering bureaucracies... And they're still around. Given, they have a lot more inertia than Google.

[mc32]

Just a nit pick but those who usurped Kodak’s ceded digital camera market only had about ten to fifteen years of market left. Most people gave up their point and shoots as soon as phone cameras achieved near parity with dedicated cameras. Today phone cameras are better than dedicated point and shoots and only full frame 35mm and above are better (in raw format). Phone do a lot of fancy processing to make up for the small lenses.

The point is that profit wasn’t in cameras or devices but in the multi-purpose handheld computers connected to captured services.

[hakfoo]

There was probably an exit ramp for some of the smaller camera makers in the consulting/branding game. Once camera phones became good enough people might willingly use them, there was an opportunity to position yourself as "the phone with real camera expertise behind it". Send over a few engineers and optics experts to the phone manufacturer, develop some co-branded apps, and bingo, the new Xiaomi P300 Presented By Minolta.

I know there were occasional "camera first" designs (the Lumia 1020 comes to mind) but they tended to be creamed on the market for reasons other than the camera factor. Modern phones are a study in "okay, you compensated for mediocre optical components with a lot of software", so I have to wonder what we'd get if we combined them with inherently better optics.

I'd think the possible targets here would have been the "second tier" camera brands that had narrower product lines and less distribution, but decent brand recognition. It didn't matter if you were cut out of the point-and-shoot market if nobody was buying your point-and-shoot cameras in the first place.

Did the camera firms themselves reject the concept of slumming with VGA sensors and plastic lenses, or was there just no percieved market?

[CobaltFire]

Phones are only better than the entry point and shoots, and have absolutely demolished that market.

Where they compete with more advanced point and shoots (I.e. the 1” sensor class) is in their ability to take the picture, edit it, and publish it seemlessly. They only match those cameras if you are consuming on a phone as well; as soon as anything higher quality comes into play their shortcomings become clear very quickly.

I’m a hobby photographer and haven’t bothered with a pocket camera for years due to this. I have a full frame Canon and my iPhone and that’s a good enough divide for me.

[XorNot]

Conversely a phone will get you "acceptable" quality very reliably, whereas something like my Canon 5D (outdated now I know) always felt like a complete wildcard, and since I don't know photography, not worth the hassle at all.

Which is to say: my phone will reliably get me a perfectly good image even blown up in size for viewing - which is to say, no blurriness under most conditions. My 5D wants me to account for all sorts of stuff, and then I still wind up with a blurry image or can't tell if I got the focus dead on for sharpness or a dozen other things.

I think that's largely because the post-image review on dedicated cameras sucks, whereas phone screens are high resolution with pinch-to-zoom so you can actually inspect the output quite quickly. I am very surprised no one's cottened onto making a higher-end camera which slots a phone right onto the back so you can real-time view what you've just taken a picture of to check it came out okay, because it's the biggest flaw.

[godelski]

> since I don't know photography, not worth the hassle at all.

I think that's the market that was destroyed though. Just the average person that wants a photo can just use their phone. But if you still want professional quality (or even as a hobby) a dedicated camera is still highly beneficial. The difference is that even in the automatic mode (which you should learn to not use) you _just_ get the photo. Your phone on the other hand does a significant amount of post processing. You have little control over this, which isn't going to make it great for even amateur photography. But just for posting to your instagram, yeah, phones are going to win.

[mc32]

I don’t disagree with what you’re saying but want to add that phones are good enough for journalism and reporting (whereas previously photojournalists were often identified by their Leicas).

[godelski]

Oh I agree with this.

[chx]

I am not so surprised, the challenges for connecting a phone to a camera quick and reliably is formidable. You need a connection capable of transferring a several hundreds megabit file in a reasonable time (a RAW is like 40MB). Bluetooth just won't cut it. Of course, in theory WiFi Direct would do it but then Apple obviously does something else. Wired connection, unless you want to fiddle with the connector would require magnetic connectors and at least today there are no USB C magnetic cables which would or rather could adhere to the specification. It's been three years since https://twitter.com/USBCGuy/status/1186718432932159488 and there's still nothing.

And of course this is just the electronics, then you'd need to work something out mechanically. It needs to attach safely and quickly but also detach when needed. It's instructive how most quality phone cases are not universal rather there's a separate one for each model.

[kevin_thibedeau]

It's worth pointing out that Kodak did pioneer digital photography but were too early for it to be affordable with acceptable quality for the average consumer. In niche fields like photo-journalism they were the king of digital until they weren't.

[bpye]

Whilst true it seems likely that had sensor technology not evolved with point and shoots, phones wouldn't have been able to include cameras - certainly not as quickly as they did.

[conradev]

The grandparent comment is trying to emphasize that there just isn’t a technology gap between Google and OpenAI.

Google is not sitting on their hands. They are perfectly capable of training large language models and already have. Google is just as much a leader in AI research as OpenAI.

GPT-4 is rumored to contain proprietary signals from Bing search: https://twitter.com/RamaswmySridhar/status/16056030559734538...

Google has plenty of proprietary signals of their own. OpenAI, on the other hand, could not have made its models without Microsoft.

The second that large language models are put into production for search, Google will be ready to follow suit. That is, if they don’t do it first.

[Kamq]

> The grandparent comment is trying to emphasize that there just isn’t a technology gap between Google and OpenAI.

This is an entirely fair point, and I think I just missed it on my first reading of that post.

> Google is not sitting on their hands. They are perfectly capable of training large language models and already have. Google is just as much a leader in AI research as OpenAI.

This, however, I still don't think is a good place for google to be. It assumes that training the AI is the hard part. I don't think it is, at least not for google. I think the hard part for them would be marketing, ux, and supporting (as in customer support) a product that isn't search in the long term. This hasn't been their wheelhouse, and if they don't start working on the details now, they could very easily end up with a technically superior product that nobody uses.

[conradev]

Google has orders of magnitude more page views than OpenAI and is a top 10 brand in the world in terms of marketing.

I feel like operating the largest search engine in the world, the largest email service in the world, a top 5 cloud computing platform, etc etc qualifies them pretty well to run… a better search engine, or whatever LLMs grow to be.

[Kamq]

> ...qualifies them pretty well to run… a better search engine, or whatever LLMs grow to be.

Running it? Absolutely. Once again, their technical chops are not in question (at least by me).

My concern is their ability to capitalize on it. I, personally, don't trust them to stick by a product that's not search long term. I don't think I know anyone that does, it's kind of a meme by this point. I mean, killedbygoogle.com is a thing for a reason. Why would I integrate a product that's just going to be killed into my workflow?

I suppose email is the exception to that, but is there a product post 2010 that they've stuck with and properly pushed.

The way I'd expect it to work would be that they launch a product, not really market it well, and then kill it a year or two afterwards. Then 5-10 years later, they'd realize that was the product they should have stuck with. They can re-launch at that point, but at that point they're 5-10 years behind and trying to get people to switch to something that's been killed once already.