It isn't exactly news, though. This isn't a Forbes issue, or a Google issue. Pretty much every single large company is actively being ruined by parasites. We're dealing with a generation of CEOs / CFOs who were taught to care about nothing except short-term shareholder value. Quality and reputation doesn't matter anymore, so you replace your products with cheap garbage and hope nobody notices. When that inevitably fails, every single part of the company including its name is being torn apart and sold piece by piece, until nothing is left but an empty shell with a lot of debt.
We're intentionally ruining our economies and praising the people doing it. If the "Western" world gets economically steamrolled by Asia in the next couple of decades, we've got nobody to blame for it but ourselves.
While greed, short term vision etc are universal, Asia is not (yet) as bad. Take banks for example, say Singapore. How many Singaporean banks have failed vs American? Asian banks are way more conservative (relatively at least) and don't play aggressive with their customers' money.
My fear is that it is only going to get worse (both in the west and in Asia).
It's exactly news. It spots the issue, dives into it, exposes the source of it, and details the structure of how it came into existence. That's what news is. That you're not surprised by it is not material.
> we've got nobody to blame for it but ourselves.
Ironically you are the one who characterized this article as "not news."
That's wrong. This is very much a Google monopoly issue.
Google has zero incentive to improve search for users since there is no competition. Google has every incentive to maximize the amount of money that search makes them.
Simply busting up companies with monopolies would fix 80%+ of the problems.
> Google has zero incentive to improve search for users since there is no competition.
Not sure I buy this. People will overwhemingly choose 'cheap' over all other qualities. Anyone providing the sort of competition to Google will have to 1) do it for free, 2) be better enough to displace users, and 3) stay in business long enough to matter. Even if you broke Google up, who would be in a position to compete with their search platform?
>We're dealing with a generation of CEOs / CFOs who were taught to care about nothing except short-term shareholder value. Quality and reputation doesn't matter anymore, so you replace your products with cheap garbage and hope nobody notices.
There is a line where you really do need to compromise on quality and even reputation to keep costs down, though. If you can't or refuse to do that, you end up stagnant and irrelevant like Japan.
Customers ultimately don't care how much sincerity and effort was infused into a product as long as it's past a certain "good enough" threshold.
> Customers ultimately don't care how much sincerity and effort was infused into a product as long as it's past a certain "good enough" threshold.
This is not universally true. For one thing, it has changed over time as expectations shift. Presumably our expectations have been forced downward by the diminishing quality and increasing costs of consumer goods. There is also cultural variation, with Japan as an example.
I agree, but the economy as a whole seems to have swung to the completely opposite side. Every product is either turning into disposable one-time-use items, or into a subscription. Even "luxury" items aren't providing quality anymore.
I'm not calling for t-shirts that are guaranteed to last 20 years, but it would be nice if clothing didn't fall apart after a wash or two just because they saved 5% on material cost.
Yes, there's a lot of crap out there but I also don't want to pay a huge premium for everything so that it lasts a lifetime (and will probably be outdated or out of fashion long before that).
> We're dealing with a generation of CEOs / CFOs who were taught to care about nothing except short-term shareholder value.
We're dealing globally and in every industry with almost all shareholders being either retirement funds, elderly individuals, or other organizations controlled by elderly individuals. And the current generation of elderlies want to benefit as much as they possible can from any wealth being created. They haven't much time left to live and they prefer to not leave much of value behind.
I’m not sure how this applies to the conversation. The challenges being discussed here are centred around managing compliance and long-term sustainability within specific platform ecosystems. It’s about navigating policies, ensuring longevity, and minimising risk rather than short-term shareholder gains. The generational divide you’re mentioning doesn’t really seem relevant in this scenario.
It is a big story if one can make it part of the anti-trust actions. Google having a monopoly which it leaves laying around as a weapon to be picked up by the next most corrupted big player to damage real businesses. The impact on the market is measurable (with naked eye), is distorting the market (which anti-trust is dealing with) and is an instance of escalating (making it actionable) domain reputation abuse. Google failing to police such blatant abuse might also open them to class action lawsuits.
It isn't exactly news, though. This isn't a Forbes issue, or a Google issue. Pretty much every single large company is actively being ruined by parasites. We're dealing with a generation of CEOs / CFOs who were taught to care about nothing except short-term shareholder value. Quality and reputation doesn't matter anymore, so you replace your products with cheap garbage and hope nobody notices. When that inevitably fails, every single part of the company including its name is being torn apart and sold piece by piece, until nothing is left but an empty shell with a lot of debt.
We're intentionally ruining our economies and praising the people doing it. If the "Western" world gets economically steamrolled by Asia in the next couple of decades, we've got nobody to blame for it but ourselves.
> If the "Western" world gets economically steamrolled by Asia in the next couple of decades, we've got nobody to blame for it but ourselves.
Implicit in that statement is that only the "Western world" has that "short erm shareholder value" ethos. I'd say that is quite debatable.
While greed, short term vision etc are universal, Asia is not (yet) as bad. Take banks for example, say Singapore. How many Singaporean banks have failed vs American? Asian banks are way more conservative (relatively at least) and don't play aggressive with their customers' money.
My fear is that it is only going to get worse (both in the west and in Asia).
> It isn't exactly news, though.
It's exactly news. It spots the issue, dives into it, exposes the source of it, and details the structure of how it came into existence. That's what news is. That you're not surprised by it is not material.
> we've got nobody to blame for it but ourselves.
Ironically you are the one who characterized this article as "not news."
> This isn't a Forbes issue, or a Google issue.
That's wrong. This is very much a Google monopoly issue.
Google has zero incentive to improve search for users since there is no competition. Google has every incentive to maximize the amount of money that search makes them.
Simply busting up companies with monopolies would fix 80%+ of the problems.
> Google has zero incentive to improve search for users since there is no competition.
Not sure I buy this. People will overwhemingly choose 'cheap' over all other qualities. Anyone providing the sort of competition to Google will have to 1) do it for free, 2) be better enough to displace users, and 3) stay in business long enough to matter. Even if you broke Google up, who would be in a position to compete with their search platform?
2 replies →
>We're dealing with a generation of CEOs / CFOs who were taught to care about nothing except short-term shareholder value. Quality and reputation doesn't matter anymore, so you replace your products with cheap garbage and hope nobody notices.
There is a line where you really do need to compromise on quality and even reputation to keep costs down, though. If you can't or refuse to do that, you end up stagnant and irrelevant like Japan.
Customers ultimately don't care how much sincerity and effort was infused into a product as long as it's past a certain "good enough" threshold.
> Customers ultimately don't care how much sincerity and effort was infused into a product as long as it's past a certain "good enough" threshold.
This is not universally true. For one thing, it has changed over time as expectations shift. Presumably our expectations have been forced downward by the diminishing quality and increasing costs of consumer goods. There is also cultural variation, with Japan as an example.
I agree, but the economy as a whole seems to have swung to the completely opposite side. Every product is either turning into disposable one-time-use items, or into a subscription. Even "luxury" items aren't providing quality anymore.
I'm not calling for t-shirts that are guaranteed to last 20 years, but it would be nice if clothing didn't fall apart after a wash or two just because they saved 5% on material cost.
Yes, there's a lot of crap out there but I also don't want to pay a huge premium for everything so that it lasts a lifetime (and will probably be outdated or out of fashion long before that).
> We're dealing with a generation of CEOs / CFOs who were taught to care about nothing except short-term shareholder value.
We're dealing globally and in every industry with almost all shareholders being either retirement funds, elderly individuals, or other organizations controlled by elderly individuals. And the current generation of elderlies want to benefit as much as they possible can from any wealth being created. They haven't much time left to live and they prefer to not leave much of value behind.
I’m not sure how this applies to the conversation. The challenges being discussed here are centred around managing compliance and long-term sustainability within specific platform ecosystems. It’s about navigating policies, ensuring longevity, and minimising risk rather than short-term shareholder gains. The generational divide you’re mentioning doesn’t really seem relevant in this scenario.
1 reply →
It is a big story if one can make it part of the anti-trust actions. Google having a monopoly which it leaves laying around as a weapon to be picked up by the next most corrupted big player to damage real businesses. The impact on the market is measurable (with naked eye), is distorting the market (which anti-trust is dealing with) and is an instance of escalating (making it actionable) domain reputation abuse. Google failing to police such blatant abuse might also open them to class action lawsuits.
Yes, this is a big deal, but most of us have simply stopped using Google and moved on to other tools.
> most of us have simply stopped using Google
Citation needed
Google has lost a small amount of market share, but nothing too significant to warrant "most of us have simply stopped using Google": https://searchengineland.com/googles-huge-search-market-shar....