Without search they would still have GMail, Maps, YouTube, Chrome, Android, and AdSense/Adwords. Surely that counts for something. That's the #1 email service, #1 navigation and mapping system, #1 video hosting website, #1 browser, #1 mobile phone platform, and #1 online advertising system. Then of course Cloud, Drive, Docs, Translate and all sorts of other services.

I don't know how you can consider that nothing and being lazy. These are services used by most of us on a daily basis. It's an impressive and diverse group of products, and it would be very difficult to compete against any single one of them.

> It feels like the unhealthiest FAANG

Really? You think Netflix is in a stronger position? They're a single product that depends on the ever changing licensing from a variety of third-parties.

What happens to Apple revenue without the iPhone and supporting services and products?

Facebook and Instagram feel susceptible to falling out of fashion and not being cool. That's a scary business to bet on long term. It's also far easier to build a Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp clone compared to Google Search.

Something less likely and arguably much less bad than what would happen to Google if the floor fell out of the targeted internet advertising game?

Of your 6 "#1s" you listed for Google, only one of them is directly a revenue source and not a loss leader of some form or another with AdSense/Adwords being the tail wagging the entire dog. (Even being generous including GSuite revenue as a part of Gmail, and YouTube Premium/Music/TV/Subscription-O-The-Day revenue as if it were not a minority of YouTube users, it is still majorly advertising driving Google's revenue.)

Facebook is susceptible to exact same instability, of course, but ironically for Facebook is maybe more stable in some eyes by sole factor of being less diversified because most of Facebook isn't high cost loss leaders.

You mean like CBS, NBC, and ABC, aged 93, 92, and 77 respectively?

Netflix is a single platform but arguably every piece of content is its own product.

That's the problem. As time goes on, all the really popular shows will have left Netflix (Friends, The Office, Frasier, Always Sunny, etc) and all that will be left are Netflix Originals.

The vast majority of those are not premium shows like The Crown, You and Stranger Things, but straight-to-DVD caliber bilge that will initially entice users because of the netflix branding, but turn them off once they realize it's low quality. You can't keep commissioning new programming forever while keeping the price at $12.99/mo. or whatever.

How many shows does NBC have each year? How many are still around the next?

Netflix does the same thing as all the other Networks. The difference is, since it's all on demand, they can just keep their low quality stuff around for the few people who actually enjoyed it, making their service appeal to a broader base.

Netflix's goal isn't to have only mega-hits -- it's to have enough different stuff to keep all the subscribers happy.

There is a very small Venn diagram of people who like Stranger Things and that new Goop show, and that's just what Netflix wants.

People don't pay $12.99 for NBC each month.

But they do, by viewing ads. They pay with their attention. That's how they pay NBC too.

The same money spent on content has higher ROI the bigger the subscriber count is -> the more/better content they produce, they more subscribers they can get -> the more subscribers, the more money they get to play with.

The mix of lower and higher-end content probably makes sense because the low end content is cheap to produce and caters to people with niche interests, or people who watch constantly and just want something new to watch.

Pre-VHS, Disney would re-release movies in theaters. They could re-release Fantasia, or Cinderella, or whatever, and still make money in theaters in the 1970s.

But, there wasn't that much content to watch at that time. You had live TV or movies. That was it.

Today there is more on-demand content out there than I could watch if I lived a million years. Do you think "Bright" will keep subscribers 10 years from now for Netflix?

Just as an example: "Band of Brothers" and "The Wire" are two of the best things I've ever watched. Would I _keep_ an HBO subscription forever after I've watched them? No...

These products aren’t by themselves profitable, they just build the datasets used for advertising

It's hard to find numbers online, but it seems like Maps generates about 10 billion in annual revenue, and YouTube 10-20 billion. For comparison, Netflix has 20 billion in annual revenue and 1-2 billion in annual profits.

The person I was replying to said Google is the most unhealthy of the FAANG companies with nothing to show aside from search. But... one part of their "nothing" generates as much revenue as one of those FAANG companies.

Google is one of my least favorite businesses, but I feel like everyone is downplaying their accomplishments and diversity.

These are primarily ads-based revenue channels. Sure, they have some enterprise Gmail subscriptions, Youtube 'premium', and take a cut of the play store, but those are all primarily platforms to serve you ads.

Products that Google tries to monetize that aren't supported by ads seem to fold.

This is not going to happen unless antitrust regulators deal with what reinforces Google's search market share: the distribution they buy with TAC (e.g Safari and Firefox) and what they get for free (Chrome) and close to free (Android).

The antitrust remedy should be to separate Chrome and Android from Google and place a ban for some amount of time where they can't buy being the default.

Tech people might have switched to Google because it was legitimately better than the competition, but you're still living in 2000 if you think that's how Google got big. There's a reason why the CEO of Google is someone who was responsible for building the moat around Search (Google Toolbar and Chrome).

And yet, legions of HN'ers use and recommend Chrome, GMail, Google's Cloud offerings, Google Voice, GoogleFi, etc...

I wonder if the problem is that there are no good alternatives to Big G, or if it's just some kind of mental disconnect.

Every single one of those has an alternative. I'm using Firefox at home and Brave on mobile.

I do need to replace Gmail. My primary inbox uses my own domain, so that won't be too hard if and when I decide to switch.

Moreover, if Google lost search, how is it going to survive on those other products? Not one of them is special and doesn't have a competing offering available.

/Not affiliated with FastMail. I'm just someone who switched ~10 accounts from GMail to FastMail a year ago and am happier for it.

I don't think that's the prevalent view around here anymore tbh.

I can't see that hurting their already-established products, but I'm seeing even non-technical users get increasingly gun-shy about adopting new Google products.

> At this point, their results are such a trash fire it can't be that hard.

So far, the other search platforms seem to be even more of a trash fire. (Obviously, this is subjective.)

The thing is, search gets harder every day: The number of bad actors polluting search grows. It's not fair to claim that declining search quality is proof that Google as an organization is declining in competence.

The company is still very profitable with several major product lines. It's far from dying and there's no 2nd place competition even close in the areas it dominates (search and advertising).

How do you imagine that happening in practice? Say that someone comes with a competitor search that is overall better than Google search is right now. It won't be hugely better because Google search is pretty decent but even if it's significantly better it would have to so good that almost everyone cares enough to change their default search AND it would require that Google doesn't react to the new competition. With >100 billions of dollars in the treasure chest it seems extremely unlikely that Google wouldn't have the time and resources to react and improve their search engine in the face of true competition and they wouldn't even need to make it better than the competition, just make it good enough that's not worth for most people to switch.

Also, creating a competing search engine isn't just a matter of secret juice and algorithms, it's mostly a matter of tons of network bandwidth, CPU, memory and storage. While I'm sure there are plenty of people outside of Google that can come up with brilliant new searching algorithms to actually make that into a successful product that matches the scale of Google's web products you'd need a lot of money and time.

Microsoft of all companies is even more bumbling and mercurial. They are where they are with respect to cloud today mostly due to dumb luck and in spite of their corporate strategy.

There are dozens of Microsoft product shutdowns that have had similar or bigger impacts on customers.

Name 3 products that Microsoft has "shut down" with little to no warning.

Microsoft has done a great job of sunsetting products. They give months, usually at least a year of warning that a product is being discontinued or deprecated, and continue supporting that product for another several years even after it is no longer available for sale. (Zune Music, for example, no longer works, but Microsoft didn't turn off the servers for Zune until 2015, 3 years after they stopped selling the devices, and refunded purchases made on the service. Zune devices still continue to work and it's still possible to get battery replacements for them.)

It's hard to feel Microsoft is being "mercurial" when they keep saying things like "We gave this a shot of X years and it didn't have the marketshare we hoped for."

In comparison, Google has generally seemed less forthright with reasons, plans, long term strategies for their products. It's very easy to imagine given how many Google products supposedly originate out of "20% time" how often projects just get shut down for the reason of "no one still wanted to work on this in their 20% time", not some market fit reason, some long term strategy, much less with any vision of alternatives for existing customers or migration strategies.

- Access for Office 365

- Windows 10 SCCM/MDM co-management

- Health Vault

I will say that Microsoft has historically had a more clearly defined release and support cadence for their products, and they clearly articulate options for end of life in most situations. That said, products like Windows 10 and red-haired stepchild products change often enough that they effectively lack a meaningful support strategy.

- Windows 10 SCCM/MDM is still available. This is what my company's IT department uses. They were very surprised to learn that MS had supposedly killed a feature they use every day, including today, without warning. You might be thinking of specific features that were removed?

- MS Health Vault. Yeah, that one was definitely Googled. Notably, MS did keep Health Vault open longer after the shutdown announcement than Google did with Google Health after announcing GH's shutdown.

Windows 10 SCCM/MDM still exists, but SCCM is in read only mode if you use an MDM solution in co-management.

Windows Phone

Games for Windows Live (Which was a horrible piece of crapware that was pushed onto an unwanting public to begin with.)

Google's only real operating principle is "do no harm"...to the revenue-generating Google products. Everything else can and will be discarded at a moment's notice.

Yes, I can build a Gmail clone in a few months. No, I can't get Android Assistant to automatically read invitations from it, add them to my calendar, generate maps to the event on the fly, and tell me when I need to leave to avoid being late to get there.

So yeah, it's a moat, and it's a pretty damned big one.

And for all that Google indexes and initiates from their end, every SEO worker on earth also makes sure their client's sites are properly formatted and submitted. That kind of buy-in is reserved for companies that can demonstrate you'll get a return on your investment.

What? That makes no sense to me. There have been thousands of some of the smartest/highly skilled people (payed some of the highest salaries) in the industry building systems for decades, that's Google infrastructure today. How do you expect to replicate that quickly without similar investment in time and money?

The hard to surmount "moat" is inherent to the tech and its demands. Just take the amount of dark fiber they have or the highly customized datacenter hardware and software stack and the sheer amount of them. Sure, you can replace all that with a smaller set of VMs using someone's "cloud services" but your margins, power use efficiency and scale will be much worse.

That reminds me of a discussion with a Linux filesystem engineer: building a POSIX filesystem is easy, building a thread-safe highly scalable fast and efficient POSIX filesystem is hard. You can have a single operating systems student build a simple POSIX filesystem in one day but it takes year-hours of multiple highly experienced system engineers to get a production level filesystem.

Leveraging spam detection algorithms across all accounts is a brilliant idea, and a paradigm shift from what people were doing. A genius thought of it. Relatively speaking, it doesn't take a genius to replicate.

Also worth remembering that AJAX/XHR technologies were very new when Gmail was being built. Fleshing out the interactivity on the site was a herculean feat relative to the amount of effort it would take to rebuild the thing today in React, Vue, or Angular.

The groundwork they laid in building Gmail is now available to the commonfolk, so yes, replicating the effort today would take considerably less time than pioneering the effort then, and I don't think that's pejorative in any way.

Well put. I'm no MS fan but this rings very true.

Google will have a hard sell for "enterprise" tools if they keep pulling the plugs. Rewriting custom built applications into non-deprecated platforms is expensive.

(I don't know if a similar reasoning exists behind encouraged migrations from FoxPro to Access, but I'd imagine that given how very long Access supported FoxPro imports and databases, there's probably a similar sentiment inside those parts of Microsoft.)

Those kind of compatibility break/evolutionary steps are always hard, and Microsoft could always have handled them better, but seeing as how even open source continues to have the exact same problems (say the Python 2/3 debate or the Perl 5/6 stuff) it's hard to say that anyone in software has a good handle on this stuff. Microsoft at least seems to try every time to offer migration paths and assistance/help.

It wasn't backward compatible in the least bit. You pretty much had to start over. The auto-converters were poor, mostly because GUI land doesn't map well to Web Land.

In the Python 2-to-3 change, most just had to re-test and do minor tweaks to existing code (at least so I hear). Few had to start the code-base over. If I had to score the difference on a 1-to-10 scale, the Python change was like a 2.5 and the VB change was like a 7.5.

Beyond that there are the exact same basic economic disincentives to migrate: large code bases have larger sunk costs, more friction, and less interest in migrating. It's the really large code bases that have the most reason to be disruptive in any migration.

In the VB6 to VB7 change, some could have just "re-test and do minor tweaks to existing code", even without the GUI converter helping you with all the Designer-generated metacode, had you been using VB best practices. There wasn't anything anywhere near as significant as say a massive change to default representation and syntax of strings (such as Python 3 switching to Unicode by default; VB6 at least came from Microsoft's UCS-2 era, which is also partly how so many of its programs have managed to survive in Enterprise this long). The problems were much more long delayed deprecations and a bit more forced handholding in project organization (classes existed in VB from the beginning, but so much VB was still global variables and disorganized global modules).

As someone involved in multiple migrations out of VB6 at this point in my career, second only to big Enterprise Sunk Costs reasons, I very much feel that project organization was the biggest reason codebases had to "start over". A large VB6 project built using almost nothing but global variables and global modules is a fun spaghetti ball to untangle back into some semblance of OOP. It wasn't anything syntactic or technical (otherwise presumably better migration tools could have been built if it were something mechanical like that).

Even the closest to a technical problem was essentially a universal one that applied somewhat similarly to Python 3 as it did to VB7: C/C++ FFI changed a great deal from ActiveX papering over COM's worst faults and VB pretending DLL calls were easy (and shuffling its DLL Hell under the carpet) to .NET's complicated COM relationship and P/Invoke system that more accurately reflect the FFI reality in Windows (versus VB bubblegum and lollipops). Even then, P/Invokes sure look a lot like VB<=6 FFI calls because they were clearly based on it. (There are also ways in .NET to pretend COM is friendlier than it is, themselves early VB inspired.) FFI can be assumed to be a challenge in just about any language upgrade/update/migration in the history of languages, and that's not entirely a backwards compatibility problem you can fix nor prevent in the language design. (Look at the native interfaces of any and every other language out there.)

(Sure, I've seen the laundry lists of complaints of things that weren't backwards compatible, but compared to the 80/20, it's absolutely fair to compare VB 6/7 and Python 2/3, and to admit there is no magic "right" solution in either case to avoid the migration hurdles both experienced.)

> The auto-converters were poor, mostly because GUI land doesn't map well to Web Land.

While there was a lesser used "webforms" converter, the major converter was direct GUI to GUI from VB6 to .NET 1.0 WinForms, very apples-to-apples, and it did a rather good job given what it had to work with (both the byzantine messes that were the average VB<=6 codebase and the young and not quite polished, but certainly capable in theory of everything previous VB did, .NET 1.0 WinForms). While with hindsight we mostly all agree "webforms" was a bad idea, it wasn't the emphasis in migration stories, and it certainly was never the only option (and where it was seen as the only option likely the local myopia of management that were the ones wanting the instant jump to Web Land "for cheap" in a migration to secure funds for said migration in the lands of sunk costs).

Everybody had a different opinion about what those were. Things that look obvious in hindsight weren't.

Re: While with hindsight we mostly all agree "webforms" was a bad idea

Do you mean in general or early versions? It seems a git-er-done platform for smallish apps without the fuss and muss of MVC. Our Webforms group is more productive than our MVC group. If MVC pays off in the distant future, nobody can really tell yet. Our MVC stack is poorly tuned, but that's the problem with MVC: it requires decent oversight. MVC typically can have more JavaScript eye-candy to dazzle, but I'm not sure it's worth it from a raw productivity standpoint. The org is paying a toy tax.

I mean every version of Webforms. Webforms is entirely dead in 2020. There's no support in .NET 5. It's not surprising that your Webforms group seems more productive, and MVC more "poorly tuned", as both are common misperceptions, and performance and web standards/best practices continue to show MVC better aligned with today's standards and performance than Webforms ever could be. (It's also related to why it isn't surprising some of the Webforms fans are busy building Rube Goldberg machines in Blazor today to replace their lost love.)

Re: "Webforms is entirely dead in 2020. There's no support in .NET 5."

Deprecated, yes, dead no. MS announced no plans to stop basic maintenance. Even ASP Classic still runs on IIS (upon configuration adjustments). I'm not necessarily saying using deprecated products is "good", only that Web Forms programmers seem to get more done in average for typical custom CRUD apps. It looks like productivity is being shot in the head to keep Future Compliant.

Re: "and web standards/best practices continue to show MVC better aligned with today's standards and performance than Webforms ever could be."

What is "better aligned with..." exactly? I'm not claiming Web Forms is "web scale". I'm just saying use a Chevy instead of Maserati if you don't actually need a Maserati because Maserati's are expensive and high maintenance. Too many want to stick every buzzword in their stack to keep their resume HR-bot-match-compatible. It's fraud in my opinion.

I would note the needs of CRUD are different than the needs of "web" in the CMS-ish sense. MS stacks of late seem to try to cater to both, and it makes for unnecessary complexity. I think they should split and have a CRUD-friendly stack different from a CMS-ish stack.

Most of the stuff like Me ended up being integrated, and based on my experience at a couple of Orgs where regular office users naturally migrated from VBA into VB.NET, it was quite natural for them to do so.

Maybe those that hacked around on VB like it was QBasic (note not QuickBasic), or still stuck with VBX programming model instead of OCX, had issues migrating.

I also buy at least some of the runtime environment arguments. Microsoft did a better job of slipstreaming the VB6 Runtime install into Windows itself (and did a fascinating job of mostly protecting VB1-6 users from the DLL Hell management of said Runtimes, plural) and also early application installer that enough VB6 users had some interesting illusion that they were creating "real" EXE files without a runtime. As opposed to the early days of .NET where few Windows systems could just be assumed to have it installed and slipstreaming it into most InstallShield-style installers was never fun.

This has resulted in Perl 6 being renamed to Raku (https://raku.org using the #rakulang tag on social media). So now there's Perl, and there's Raku. Each going their own way, but with Raku offering a migration path with its Inline::Perl5 module, allowing you to run (almost) any Perl code in Raku.

Microsoft stopped selling phones with those systems long before they stopped supporting them. They didn't just "turn off the servers" on those devices like Google has done with Nest. My old WM 6.5 phone still worked the last time I played with it.

I know a lot of developers had problems at each step of that migration curve and that it wasn't as smooth in reality as it should have been (and was on paper), but calling each transition a reboot or a restart (or "completely different, incompatible") doesn't make sense when so many of the moving parts were the same and backward compatible with each other.

Microsoft and/or Verizon also offered full refunds to the dozen people who purchased the device after MS announced it would be shutting down the Kin servers.

I think DDG's going to give them a run for their money. In terms of relevance they seem to offer the superior product - at least in my own experience.