Comment by echelon
8 days ago
I don't think we should cheer on one of the largest companies in the world to build a product to get them even more enterprise stranglehold.
The praise for this monopoly is misdirected. Every single one of you, unless you're a significant GOOG shareholder, should be wanting for antitrust breakup of Google. They're putting pressure on your wages and other investments, and they're contributing to a ceiling for other startups and companies.
Google engineers are brilliant, but the corporation itself needs to be horizontally dismantled into several Googles that all compete with one another. (Not simply a vertical breakup along product lines, but rather the old-school "Ma Bell" style breakup that creates companies that then have to compete on the same offerings.)
A breakup would be good for GOOG investors too, because there's far more value locked up in the company and far too many opportunities left by the wayside.
I dont get this idea of breaking big companies up is inherently a good thing. As a non-American, I think the breakup of AT&T/Bell Labs was a mistake. The world is yet to create a lab as innovative as Bell Labs. Current Google only comes even close with their far out projects(that dont directly make money) such as their quantum computing/deepmind/boston dynamics(when google had them)
Besides, if one does break up google, you wouldnt have those divisions running.
If there are far more opportunities left by the wayside, some one is going to out compete them, ie Slack and Teams
> As a non-American, I think the breakup of AT&T/Bell Labs was a mistake.
With the benefit of hindsight, the break up was performed in the most ineffective way you could possibly imagine.
Take a national monopoly, and convert it into seven regional monopolies, which don't compete on price or service? Then let those monopolies merge back into three companies?
Countries that addressed national telecoms monopolies with local loop unbundling and similar policies seem to have ended up with much more competitive markets.
The Bell breakup is the only reason we have communication technologies newer than $2/minute telephone calls or (for the same price) Telex.
Bell had one good side, that was Bell Labs. How was it funded? By overcharging the whole country for communications, pocketing 90% of the profit, and using the last 10% to find ways to lower costs to provide the service — cost decreases that would not be passed onto customers.
It was even worse than it is right now with the regional internet monopolies.
> The world is yet to create a lab as innovative as Bell Labs.
That was entirely accidental. There's absolutely no guarantee that any given monopoly will produce anything remotely like Bell Labs, and I don't believe that a monopoly was required to do what Bell Labs did.
Google has come pretty close. Who knows how long it would've been before someone else came up with Attention is all you need.
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IBM Research when IBM was basically a monopoly was also an innovation machine.
> The world is yet to create a lab as innovative as Bell Labs.
This comment is as if "Attention is all you need" was never written and never funded by Google, and the cascade of related research that it inspired inside Google alone isn't considered either. The other Google accomplishments mentioned seem to be filtered to earlier than 2018 as well.
> I don't think we should cheer on one of the largest companies in the world to build a product to get them even more enterprise stranglehold.
Depends of how you see it. At the moment, if you want a good productivity suit of tools, you have Microsoft or Microsoft because Google is hampered by their lackluster chat client.
People would like some competition.
On that basis, Microsoft are also hampered by a lackluster chat client - Teams is atrocious. Slack is pretty much the only game in town that isn't bad (and even that needs native clients, because the UI is poor and not system-integrated).
I think I have this discussion on HN everytime Teams comes up but it really is a great piece of software for a typical office worker. File sharing is incredible. You get a SharePoint and collaborative editing in a seamless way. Video conf is great and work great with Teams compatible room booking system and room video material. The chat part barely matters. People don't use Teams to chat. It's a collaboration hub. That's what Google is missing actually.
Slack is very much developers software in comparison.
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