 |
||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| A little more about this. by blackwater 05/16/2020, 11:21pm PDT | ||||
 |
 |
|||
| The political situation doesn't look good for Google. The Republicans perceive them as pushing a progressive agenda. On the Democrat side, many people are saying we need more antitrust activity. Microsoft was saved from being broken up when George W. Bush was elected. It doesn't look like anything like that will happen for Google, even if Biden gets elected.
The investigation seems like it will focus on Google's cash cow, their advertising business. The advertising business is the oil gusher that just keeps spewing money for them and funding all the other side businesses. A lot of their stuff is based on the idea of building a moat around advertising. Android exists to stop Microsoft (or somebody) from controlling all the cell phone operating systems and setting their search home page to not-Google. Chrome exists to stop Internet Explorer or Firefox from doing the same Most of the other stuff was never really that successful, or was a research project with goals other than money (like Tensorflow), or was an acquisition (YouTube). Google desperately wants people to think of them as the cool company that does AI stuff, or cloud stuff, or Android, or really anything other than advertising. They know that if people knew how much Google knows about them, they would be freaked out. It will be interesting to see how much of this stuff gets dragged into the open, and if anyone cares. A lot of people have been commenting that breaking up Google might actually not be that bad for the current owners. Usually they phrase this as "it might be worth even more" and point to the example of Standard Oil. I actually don't think that's true, though. If the breakup follows the lines of business units, it would remove the moat around advertising. So for example, the search business unit would probably have to pay a lot more to get google.com set as the home page in all major browsers, since the Chrome business unit will presumably be soliciting bids from Microsoft and Yandex and whoever else as well. Whatever else happens, the company will be paralyzed for a while. Kind of like Microsoft during the Ballmer years. Even if this investigation fizzles, they will be really cautious from now on. So the days of Google being a good place to work are definitely over. I mean, they were already (long story...) but this really cements it. |
||||
 |
 |
|||
|
