In Antitrust Trial, Google Argues That Smart Employees Explain Its Success (nytimes.com) 36
In its antitrust confrontation with the government, the pillar of Google's defense has been that innovation -- not restrictive contracts, backed by billions in payments to industry partners -- explains its success as the giant of internet search. From a report: Its competitive advantage, it says, is brilliant people, working tirelessly to improve its products. Pandu Nayak, Google's first witness in the antitrust trial that began last month, is the face of that defense. Mr. Nayak, a vice president of search, was raised in India and graduated at the top of his class at one of that nation's elite technical schools. He came to America, earned his Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford University and then spent seven years as a research scientist on artificial intelligence projects at NASA's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley.
Nineteen years ago, Mr. Nayak joined Google and found a particularly welcoming workplace, filled with professional friends. "At the end of the day, Google is a technology company -- it really values the skills that I have," Mr. Nayak said in his testimony on Wednesday. The computer scientist's testimony is an attempt to rebut a central argument in the case filed by the Justice Department and 38 states and territories. Their suit claims that scale is essential to competition in search. That is, the more data from user queries a search engine collects, the more it learns to improve its service, which attracts still more users, advertisers and ad revenue. That flywheel, the suit says, is fueled by ever-increasing volumes of user data.
Nineteen years ago, Mr. Nayak joined Google and found a particularly welcoming workplace, filled with professional friends. "At the end of the day, Google is a technology company -- it really values the skills that I have," Mr. Nayak said in his testimony on Wednesday. The computer scientist's testimony is an attempt to rebut a central argument in the case filed by the Justice Department and 38 states and territories. Their suit claims that scale is essential to competition in search. That is, the more data from user queries a search engine collects, the more it learns to improve its service, which attracts still more users, advertisers and ad revenue. That flywheel, the suit says, is fueled by ever-increasing volumes of user data.
I think the misspelled smart (Score:5, Interesting)
Not Mutually Exclusive (Score:2)
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I just researched that documentary.
If it is the one that claims that they stole the code, it's bunk. Totally bunk, and disputed by the actual people who, you know, wrote the actual bits of code that are in Google Earth.
If it's about some other malfeasance, then let me know what!
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If it is the one that claims that they stole the code
Actually, the utterly appalling behaviour was separate to the main thrust of the documentary which was that the guy Google employed got the entire idea and basic algorithm - but not the code itself - from a group of German programmers.
The behaviour that they claimed in the program was that Google would write to startup companies who had patents that covered some new product they were developing and ask how much it would be for a license. When those companies responded in writing that it would be $1-10 m
Re: I think the misspelled smart (Score:2)
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I think from an engineering perspective I wouldnâ(TM)t be able to ethically work on a lot of the data mining / spying that is going on for the benefit of advertisers, insurance companies, and whomever is willing to pay $10 for someoneâ(TM)s personal information aggregated from a million sources
I wouldn't work for that company either. I do, however, have no problem working for Google. Many of the negative opinions about Google are based on such common falsehoods. If you're interested in understanding where you've been misled, let me know.
Hash commitment: fb259106af097b324b24bd39d462391d67e1e9b40ba7f2ed79d6f3136557faa7
Scale is not essential to search (Score:5, Interesting)
Scale is not essential to search, scale is essential to advertising.
If you only care about a handful of websites, an index of those websites is enough.
"Search" was that PageRank thing that crawled across webpages and counted links.
Scale can be set to anything, in regards to search, and still be useful.
Google has moved on from search--it shows ads and the results *it* wants you to see.
Google's value (to its customers) is its ability to "target ads" to likely prospects.
Google needs scale to see the many possible sites people are visiting. Or places
where they are physically travelling. Or people who they are contacting.
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But is not a handful of websites, for relevant search you have to index every page of every site on the world wide web. And that *is* scale.
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Most sites are not relevant to any particular search. Some sites are mere click bait. Indexing more sites, without care for quality or relevance, increases noise to signal.
What a crock of shit (Score:4, Insightful)
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You could fire everyone but the acquisitions team, the ads team and a group of techies to keep the servers/net going and see no difference.
Page Rank was new and good for its day.
But now:
Android: bought
Waymo: bought
Gmail: bought
YouTube: bought
Ad platform: bought
Docs: bought
Waze: bought
Chrome: created in-house to better track users and control the internet (to sell ads)
Is there anything G developed in house that became successful and wasn't killed off a year or two after failed launch?
They don't need ANY deve
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Maps.
However, try getting them to fix said maps. I owned a house where the driveway was listed as a public road. I tried to get it changed for years. Finally I just sold the fucking place and it's not my problem anymore. I had visions of going to small claims court and just harassing them, but it wasn't worth my time.
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A small correction. GMail was not purchased. It was an internal project at Google. Initially it was only used inside of Google, but eventually they released it to the public.
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Some of those products may have been bought (Gmail was not), but in their current state they have very little in common with what they were at buying time, from UX to code base.
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I would bet you could fire 2/3rds of their workforce and see zero impact to product quality.
I seriously doubt that, I would expect a marked improvement in quality, since most of their changes seem to make the product worse. Especially if you fired the teams dedicated to increasing marketing.
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They can still be smart (Score:2)
They can still be smart even after the company is broken up over the monopoly they are.
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Being a monopoly is ok. Totally legal.
Abusing your monody to gain unearned advantage in the marketplace like how G does is very illegal.
May I interpret this (Score:2)
to mean that you should be paying them more, considering that they are so far above the competition?
Asking for a friend...
Brilliant people, working tirelessly ... (Score:3)
Smart, as in crafty? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because you don't need geniuses to sell ads. In 2020 Alphabet made $183 Billion, $147 Billion of which was advertising. (Interestingly, it also spent 141 Billion, for a net income of 40 Billion) (https://abc.xyz/assets/investor/static/pdf/20210203_alphabet_10K.pdf?cache=b44182d)
If you think about it, Google's business is billboards. Billboards in your smartphone apps, billboards in your search results, billboards on random websites, billboards everywhere. The only thing you need to make money with billboards is real estate, and a convincing enough argument to the advertiser to suggest their investment will pay off.
The "smarts" come in when it comes to the real estate. How do they get so many billboards? By working very hard to capture and hold as much digital real estate as possible. Paying browsers to make their real estate the first stop on the web. Investing in their own browser, like investing in their own highways. Building the highway to be optimized for seeing billboards. Ensuring that their billboards are the most visible.
Doing all that in a way that *doesn't* look like a monopoly, definitely takes some smarts.
Re: Smart, as in crafty? (Score:2)
Cancelled projects say that is a lie (Score:3)
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How can you be successful if everything you worked on has been cancelled and employees churn every two to three years?
Google's employee turnover rate is 13%, which isn't terribly high for the tech industry.
Google has smart people? (Score:2)
I wasn't aware.
Google, would you please put those people to work on projects like Search, Gmail, Drive, messaging, video content, audio content, and Home. I know you are falling short in many more areas, but that would be a great start. Thanks!
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Sorry to reply to my own post, but I nearly forgot the area of their biggest deficiency: Management. Please put some of your smart people to work in that role. In fact, do that first and the rest of the issues may solve themselves.
Lena Khan under the FTC (Score:2)
To be frank the FTC has done this before. The breakup of AT&T turned into a bunch of Baby Bells that ultimately was worse for the consumer and still left AT&T, who owned the infrastructure of all the service providers, in control in the first place, and building multiple infrastructures just for the sake of competition is also in some ways damaging. That's not to say that all anti-trust is bad, the breakup of Standard Oil was ultimately pretty g
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First of all, I'm a registered independent.
Second, she is losing and it's hurting the credibility of the FTC [nytimes.com]. The FTC has suffered several major losses when historically the FTC wins 75% of cases.
Third, her loss in the Microsoft-Activision deal was, as the judge put it, a failure to produce a single document or sh
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>To be frank the FTC has done this before. The breakup of AT&T turned into a bunch of Baby Bells that ultimately was worse for the consumer and still left AT&T, who owned the infrastructure of all the service providers, in control in the first place,
You have absolutely NO IDEA what you are talking about. If the rest of your post is based off of this premise, I'd rather not get dumber by reading it, I'll stick to debunking this.
Let's take a look:
1950 AT&T:
* You rented your phone
* You rented y
Smartest people (Score:1)
It's the arrogance defense (Score:2)
The divine right of sovereigns is as fundamental as the laws of physics. Do not cross the streams and always take the blue pill. You have been warned.
I'm sure that defense will go over really well in a court of law. Just ask Elizabeth Holmes and Bankman-Fried how
Not mutually exclusive (Score:2)
That Alphabet got to where it is because it hires geniuses is not mutually exclusive of being able to abuse it's monopoly.
Or in other words this is the Chewbacca defense. But anyhow it is not for Alphabet to prove a negative, it is for the prosecution to show that Alphabet abused it's power.