Technology
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It's been an unsupportable business model from the beginning. Other than android, everything Google makes is easily replaceable by some other product. They don't have a monopoly like any of their competition that will easily sustain them. I honestly don't believe the majority of Google Engineers actually do anything innovative anymore as most of those people left the company when their pet projects were shut down in the first round of cost cutting measures (around the time Google became Alphabet).
Supposedly a deeply unprofitable one. Which is a huge chunk of why no real competition has surfaced.
It's one thing to set up a proverbial store with prices so low you choke out the competition. It's another thing to essentially pay your customers to come in, either by literally paying them or by providing a service that they pay below actual cost for.
That's probably why it's getting enshittified so quickly.
And search
Everything is replaceable if people want to. The problem is the inertia it takes to substitute it
So is a good search engine. As much as I love DuckDuckGo and daily drive it the results are much worse than google’s
Twitch, but that comes with its own problems.
It's also different as there only a few privileged channels get to keep their content forever. A lot of channels can only keep it for 2 weeks or 2 months based on their status, and a lot of creators upload their content to youtube to keep it for longer
The only benefit I get from google over ecosia or duckduckgo is I can't call a company or view their menu immediately from the search page after looking them up.
I don’t leave in an English speaking country and sometimes the results are not ideal tbh
Hopefully the alternatives catch on to that and improve outside of the English speaking world. Using Brave has been a dream for me, the results are almost always better than Google.
i personally refrain from brave, because A, those whole crypto shennenigans and what not and second, the browser is chromium based and i use firefox and i haven't bothered to put brave search yet
Copilot/Bing Search might put a big dent in that in the future. People will just ask an AI instead of "googling".
They built their entire culture on teams building new products. Which means a team would build something cool, get promoted, and leave that project. Who wants to join the maintenance side of things when all the promotions are being handed out to the ones who make new products?
It's a broken system and best of luck Google!
These layoffs didn't happen because Google is out of money. It's insanely profitable.
Erm, you think Bing is a serious competitor? Aside from search (91.54% of the global search market), Google is part of an ads duopoly that is only stalled by walled gardens like Amazon, TikTok, Wal*Mart, and the various entertainment companies. There's also Google Maps, used by 77% of users between 16 and 64, and their biggest non-iOS competitor is Waze, which Google also owns. For email, 75% of the US email market is dominated by Gmail. As for the user-generated media market, YouTube absolutely dominates that. The closest competitor (Twitch, A.K.A. Amazon) is far behind.
As for what Google engineers do, it's mostly not rip-things-up-and-start-over innovation since these are all very mature markets with billions of users. Instead it's small tweaks that generate hundreds of millions in savings or additional revenue.