I bet a significant chunk of folks reading this have a recurring charge from Google for extra storage, compute, hosting, YouTube, etc.
Google became really good at nickel/diming people
Why are Amazon or Microsoft going to be forced to compete on cost in six months?
When you are already into some combination of Office, Windows desktops, Active Directory, .NET, SQL Server, Github Copilot, then Azure feels like the natural cloud transition.
I much rather deal with Azure than the complexity maze of AWS products, IAM configurations, primitive Web based IDE tooling and shell.
Amazon would never had come up with something like VSCode, which was born as the Azure Web IDE.
But sure, if you want to buy AI tokens, you win.
This is one of those things capitalists tell themselves so they can keep believing the shtick. This is a good example of "head in the sand on purpose" thinking.
They have the power to do what exactly? Sell you some EC2 instances at reasonable prices? lol
There’s organizations that have the power to openly kidnap and execute people and we’re being melodramatic about a few buildings with computers in them
Did you see any clips from Trumps inauguration? Weren’t the CEOs of these big tech companies sitting right behind him?
Shall we even talk about Palantir?
I think it’s pretty obvious what the power of these companies are. You have to have your head pretty deep in the tech hole to think this is just about fair ec2 pricing. What I’d do to have that kind of ignorance again.
> Wasn’t it just a few months ago that a big tech CEO used his powers to gain access to all the US government data he wanted
You’re so close! The organization you want to criticize here is the government. Hope that helps :)
Like banana companies?
Doing the whole "it's both sides, really" thing after Russia invaded Ukraine just makes them look like useful idiots.
To the extent that governments work against the people, it is largely because people in some countries are collectively very stupid and willingly support such governments.
I don’t understand how this is even a remote comparison lol
If we’re worried about power there are other much scarier organizations to criticize first
You can hyper-target your ad or scam to vulnerable individual.
Unlike traditional media, like newspaper, you can post an ad with no visibility outside your target group -- which is hard to discover.
The report button is just some generic "second look" and automation within the same organization, there are no oversight.
Why?
They turned this into "search".
Every brand or product has to competitively bid for its own identity in a monopoly competitive bidding market.
It's downright evil.
Look at Google's AI rivals having to spend hundreds of millions just so customers can find them. Google Anthropic or OpenAI and see what you get.
The next admin needs to break Google up horizontally (not vertically) into competing browsers, clouds, and search products. They all need to fight. Healthy capitalism is fiercely competitive. Not whatever this invasive species that preys on everything else is.
They also need to make it illegal to place ads for registered trademarks. The EU should get in on that too.
I frequently see calls to not intervene if there's not bulletproof evidence of existing abuse, but why wait? Would you want Google to own a bunch of nuclear missiles just because they might not have misused them yet?
We need new antitrust laws and heavy taxes just on the megacorps worth $500B or more. And aggressive enforcement.
Google entered the competition in AI products late. And now they will use their power unfairly to try and make it win. When they bundle an AI Chatbot into their existing contracts for Google workspace, they are competing unfairly. When the Chrome browser steers you towards Google properties by default, they are competing unfairly. Etc. Those unfair monopolistic actions let them come into the market years late with a viable competitor to ChatGPT or other products.
And let’s not give them too much credit for transformers. A handful of researchers were paid by Google while they came up with that paper. Google didn’t really do anything to push for it and neither Google leaders nor shareholders cared much about it at the time. Not to mention, transformers themselves were just a continuation of other prior steps in ML, from what I’ve read.
The problem is how to get to the point where there is enforcement.
It definitely isn't going to happen with Republicans in power, and it also isn't a sure thing with Democrats in power either.
Lina Khan was a good start for a bit there, but she certainly didn't have universal Dem support. Establishment Democrats are going to have to grow a spine and tell the Reid Hoffmanesque donor class to get fucked.
That said, from all the informed takes I've seen, Lina Khan was seriously... flawed (putting it charitably) in her strategy and tactics. To the extent that some observers wondered if she was deliberately sabotaging the agency just to highlight the need for new, more effective laws. She did have a novel theory of consumer harm, but that requires new legislation to enforce. Instead the way she went about it -- including by flouting due process -- was extremely counter-productive.
That was a big reason she was neither very effective in her goals (other than creating a lot of noise) nor have high political support from any side.
I know, I know, it’s really hard having these insights. We all have our crosses to bear. <giggling emoji>
From the pure software side, Macromedia got acquired. RedHat was doing fine before IBM gobbled it up. But I honestly can't remember any other "picks and shovels" software companies from pre-dotcom.
Nortel - dead
Global crossing - dead
Netscape - dead (server) and/or dying (Mozilla)
Intel - almost dead
Palm - dead
Qualcomm - still around
It's actually really hard for the aristocracy to end up in a Florida trailer park.
A bunch of config management DSL startups, and web scale data storage solutions, not so much
Selling picks and shovels after the gold rush is a terrible idea.
I so hope that Google goes down. (And I pray the same for Facebook and a couple others).
At this rate, you'll hate Apple for making iPhones so damn good, or Starlink for giving really good internet access.
You line of thinking is - gosh, these companies are providing an excellent service, and I hate them for that?
The incentive for Apple or Microsoft is to make a good product that you will gladly pay for. This is very different.
A good restaurant makes an excellent product bit it doesn't mean that I will spend 5 hours there.
