[someluccc]

This illustrates why breaking up google is a good idea given their egregious charges (free) for things people used to/still spend money on, such as:

- An office software suite

- Global maps and GPS, City Guides

- Video entertainment

- Mobile and Desktop OS

- Web Browsers

Also, pay no mind to their competitors in all of those markets AND in their core business of search, being feeble multi-trillion and multi-billion global corporations

[zuminator]

Those things aren't free, they're supported by ad revenue and the sale of personal or aggregated user information. I'm not saying there isn't a place for that type of software, but imo it's wrong and somewhat dangerous to equate that with things that are actually free. And even so, to the extent that any of Google's software is actually free, it's mostly a loss leader for the sake of vendor lock-in, which is intrinsically anticompetitive.

[someluccc]

A) Do you pay them? - No: then yes it is free

“But my data” Have your ever sold your data? Would the value you could ever possibly receive for your data ever equate to the value you get from the free services?

Likely No and No.

Is the free ad supported city newspaper free? Yes it is in fact free, just like FM radio is free, and broadcast television is free, and sidewalks next to billboards are free

Someone creating something appealing and giving it away for free in order to make up for it through ads in front of eyeballs does not in any way mean that the free thing isn’t free

[bryant]

> Have your ever sold your data?

My data has been sold, yes. By me, no, because I don't have the means. But by others and especially by nefarious actors, absolutely.

So indeed, it's not free. Just because data isn't liquid at the individual level doesn't mean it has no value.

[braabe]

All of these examples are probably in part or fully paid for with some sort of taxes. So it is less "no payments" and more "deferred payments".

I would argue that the question of "Is it free?" should not be restricted to monetary payments. If I offer you dinner for an hour of yardwork - are you receiving the food for free? If I would offer you that same dinner in exchange for letting me watch you use your computer for a while, is it free?

I think ads do incur a cost on you: In usability of a service, in your attention span / desensitization and your ability to focus, in the money you would not have spent were it not for ads.

Googles services are free in the sense, that you don't spend cold hard cash on them, but I would still argue, that you pay for them. That 2 Trillion Dollar valuation has to come from somewhere... :(

[someluccc]

#1. Would I have used the computer at the same time/place/duration? Then yes it is free. It literally cost me nothing.

#2. You can pay? Also is the argument somehow that the free thing isn’t free because the ad in it makes the UX worse?

Also curious to know how many ads exactly do you get while using google workspace? drive? android? maps?

Finally: You can literally use Chrome, Workspace, Drive, Android and Maps without seeing a single ad, without an ad blocker, without EVER using google search, for free.

[hug]

There are costs other than monetary associated with doing things. Just because you are not giving someone cash directly does not mean it is "free".

Those semantics aside:

- Maps has ads in the form of sponsored results all over the map.

- Android is only a decently functional platform with Play services installed, which includes ads. I don't have an Android phone handy but I'm pretty sure there's up-sells included in quite a few places, I just can't name any right now.

- Chrome is a browser you cannot use for its primary purpose without seeing ads.

- Workspace is a directly paid-for product.

Google is an ad company. Essentially all of its products are supported by advertising, and it's slightly odd to suggest they are not.

[lelandbatey]

You're describing the difference between highly diffuse costs (taxes -> sidewalks) and transactional costs (price of a hamburger -> hamburger).

I would like private businesses to offer transactional costs. I do not want businesses leveraging diffuse costs; I'd prefer that only my governments use diffuse costs and that private businesses have limited ability to use diffuse costs. At least with government I get a vote.

[dartos]

> A) Do you pay them? - No: then yes it is free

And here we see the ostrich. When faced with the horrors of reality, sticks its head in the sand. It’s simpler in there.

[someluccc]

If I build a movie theater and give away the tickets knowing that I can make money on ads before a movie that does not mean that 5 minutes of your eyesight is now worth something

[nosianu]

> that does not mean that 5 minutes of your eyesight is now worth something

The advertisers paying to get their ads placed in front of those eyes disagree.

And ye, since another comment questions this, data or "eye-time are similar - they can be broken down to the individual.

The advertisers pay some price expecting a certain number of people to see the ad, and even if data about people is sold in bulk (too) there is a price per individual. It's a simple division to see the price they pay per person to view that cinema ad, or for one person's data, even if they always purchase those in bulk.

After all, they get to the bulk price by multiplying how much they are willing to pay for one individual with the expected (or in the case of data packages known) number of individuals.

[someluccc]

You can literally use Chrome, Workspace, Drive, Android and Maps without seeing a single ad, without an ad blocker, without EVER using google search, for free.

[hyggetrold]

Movie theater is an interesting analogy because they make zero money on ticket sales. Usually ticket revenue pays for the cost of the movie (theaters pay the studio for the movie). The way the theaters make money is on concessions, hence why they're crazy expensive.

[dartos]

That’s literally what that means…

You, the theater owner, are selling the time people are sitting in your theater in view of a large screen to advertisers. That time is literally worth something.

If there were no people in the theater, the advertisers wouldn’t pay for the time.

You just really don’t understand how advertising works.

You’re effectively saying something like “just because people would pay for something, doesn’t mean it has any value”

I have to believe that you’re an extremely skilled troll, because otherwise idk what’s going on in your head.

[consteval]

> that does not mean that 5 minutes of your eyesight is now worth something

It literally means exactly that, because you're deriving some real value (money) from 5 minutes of your eyesight. So therefore it has value.

[someluccc]

Your data is worthless. Please do tell me how much you could sell your “data” for right now.

[diggernet]

It's not worthless to companies who want to use it against me.

I don't want to sell my data. I want companies to stop collecting it.

In fact, I don't think I've seen anyone here wishing they could sell their data.

[alt227]

The data of an individual may be worth something like $0.001 which is not that much to an individual.

However the value is not nothing, and if you are a company with multiple billion users, that value of data can get pretty big pretty fast

[zuminator]

There are companies like Nielsen that will pay you directly for you to provide personal data. But regardless of that, there are plenty of things that we do for free, like babysitting our own kids or answering our own phones, that if provided to someone else we would get paid for. So if your data is worthless to you, that doesn't mean it's not valuable to someone else. And we know for a fact that data is valuable, so why are you even raising this point, except to be argumentative for its own sake?

[dartos]

My data, sure, but the data of my entire age/racial/economic group is worth a lot to marketing firms. There’s a ton of that information in emails.

That’s literally google’s business model.

You think Gmail is free bc Google is nice?

Come on…

[someluccc]

So in this transaction you’re exchanging something that is individually worthless for something that is individually valuable.

Which is a bad thing and should stop. Right now!

Ps: it’s also not like you’re paying so little that you could say you’re getting it for…… free

[nomat]

if you aren't considering the fact that your data is what enabled these companies to become such massive giants in the first place, you may be living outside of the EU.

[dmonitor]

My concern is that breaking up Google without breaking up Microsoft will basically just be giving MS a huge advantage in the multitude of categories in which they compete with each other, so we'll be left in an even worse situation than before.

[ocdtrekkie]

Microsoft is categorically incompetently run at this point. They chose to cede both the web and mobile platforms entirely to Google for free. They couple some of their most impressively engineered OS releases with things like preinstalling Candy Crush to ensure that any gain of respect their engineering deserves is immediately burnt goodwill from shoddy behavior.

Apple is mostly too dependent on vertical integration to truly take over a market. If they allowed their OS on other hardware or something, they could pull Google power but they are entirely built around being their own unique bubble.

If Google finally gets broken up, you'll probably see hardware manufacturers like Samsung and LG truly start doing interesting things again.

[dmonitor]

Giving Microsoft the market despite their incompetence is exactly what I'm worried about. They seem to have taken the "pay Washington and slowly become mandatory on every computer" strategy over "make a product people want to use" strategy, and it's paying off.

[ocdtrekkie]

Eh, I don't think Microsoft is leading in a long-term success direction. In the enterprise IT space, the shift to largely cloud services has totally undermined their monopoly: While many are on Azure, yes, the need for users to be on Windows desktops is nearly gone, and Azure is a commodity that can be easily replaced by competitors' services without end users even noticing.

Google will even with a break up, continue to control search and probably the web as a whole. Microsoft would be starting from scratch trying to build a mobile ecosystem again to compete with whatever's left of Android. And largely outside of the Windows ecosystem, Microsoft has repeatedly failed to buy control over the developer ecosystem. (All they need is one dumb PM to tick off the average GitHub user, and they're sunk there too.)

[fragmede]

Folding phones are interesting things to use.

[robertlagrant]

Yeah. Google is far less locked in than Microsoft. Gaming across Windows and Xbox vs Sony/Nintendo. Office is used by almost every org in the world. Azure locked in via clickops IT staff always wanting to pick it; you have to make a big case to use GCP or AWS in a lot of companies vs "just" using Azure.

Google's search advantage could be taken away with another website that's better. There's no installed base or corporate lockin to contend with. Same with email. Same with maps. While Google uses data from each of these services to better target ads at you, the services are not very tied into each other, and you could easily grab one of those services away from Google if you just provided a better standalone service.

To me, that's not a good case for breaking up Google.

[rafaelmn]

Is Microsoft gaming relevant that much these days ? Admittedly I'm not gaming that much but I own PS5 and Mac and I don't really feel I'm missing out on any titles I'd want to play. Big stuff comes out on PS5 and Steam - I did see Microsoft buying a bunch of studios but the impact of that feels irrelevant in grand scheme of things.

Office/GCloud does feel like the two big players but I'm sure competition would creep up here if GSuite went away (and I doubt it would, even as a standalone company).

Working for big corps these days I see that supporting Apple devices is pretty standard.

I'd say Microsoft is way less entrenched than it was 10-15 years ago technically - but they do a great job of selling Azure to enterprises. And even there AWS is a huge competitor without Google.

[dmonitor]

From a platform perspective, Microsoft's Xbox has been playing third fiddle to Nintendo and Sony for nearly a decade now. They are likely to phase out the hardware division.

Windows, on the other hand, is a very strong platform, but Valve has been chipping away at it recently by supporting efforts like Proton to play Windows games natively on Linux. Shipping a game on PC is synonymous with shipping on Windows, Mac is an afterthought, and Linux is a pipedream. Microsoft doesn't directly profit off gaming on Windows by charging a platform fee at the moment, but they have tried in the past and could in the future at the drop of a hat.

Windows's hold on gamers at this point is less about playing the games themselves and more about secondary applications, like Discord, having subpar Linux support.

On the publishing side of things, Microsoft just recently became the third largest gaming publisher in the world by buying the fourth largest gaming publisher in the world. Microsoft owns World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Call of Duty, and (for a while now) Minecraft. They own an absurdly large portion of the gaming market despite creating not a single successful franchise in-house.

[robertlagrant]

> Is Microsoft gaming relevant that much these days ?

Hyper relevant I'd say, although the Microsoft corporate touch seems to kill every studio they buy.

> Office/GCloud does feel like the two big players but I'm sure competition would creep up here if GSuite went away (and I doubt it would, even as a standalone company).

Office is orders of magnitude bigger than GSuite. It is gigantic. Governments release documents in Word format instead of OpenOffice. It's so big. GSuite is still a minnow in comparison.

[shiroiushi]

I have the exact same concern, but instead with Apple.

[hn_throwaway_99]

Sorry to repeat the "if you're not paying, you're the product, not the consumer" adage, but I think that's critically important when evaluating Google. These things aren't free, they're paid for by billions in advertising, and it's not like Google was the first to figure out this business model - radio and TV was "free" in the same manner for decades prior.

I honestly would love it we would ditch surveillance capitalism and went back to a simpler option of paying for products and services. I think that essentially all of the complaints you here about Google (their lack of any responsiveness/customer support, their constant spying on users, the constant "Google graveyard" of discontinued products, their current corporate ossification, etc.) can be directly linked to the fact that users don't pay for their products.

[someluccc]

Like I said in my comment. All of those things are things you can PAY FOR, today! To multi-trillion dollar corporations! The time you can go back to giving away your money for things google gives away for free is… now!

Excellent criticism too that the evil monopolist that devilishly gives away extremely useful and value-add products and services in order to expand its evil monopoly is also famously criticized by the victims of those free data-mining products for sometimes discontinuing them without giving them proper notice! Surely Google can’t just stop mistreating them without adequate prior notice!