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Is Google turning into Yahoo?
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turtle777
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Dec 18, 2009, 05:49 PM
 
Holy crap. I'm inclined to agree with JOHN DVORAK. What's wrong with me ?

Google is turning into a newer version of Yahoo Inc. (YHOO 16.14, -.00, -0.02%) , and I'm talking about the Yahoo that bought companies willy-nilly in the 1990's (and still does). Yahoo still makes dumb decisions to buy companies that it cannot monetize, leverage or sustain [...]
Buyer beware: Google may turn into Yahoo John Dvorak's Second Opinion - MarketWatch

So far, Google has really not found a way to make money with anything else other than advertising. They are burning billions on "ideas", but no money comes out of it.

Yes, they look quite comfortable in their position in the ad market, but nothing's forever on the intarwebs.

What do you guys think ?

-t
     
torsoboy
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Dec 18, 2009, 06:12 PM
 
I think they are still safe. As long as they continue to innovate with the search stuff, they can spend some money on other ideas and it's not a problem.
     
Eug
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Dec 19, 2009, 02:34 AM
 
Yeah, what was with Geocities.com anyway? Bought out by Yahoo and then run into the ground.

I'm starting to think the same thing will happen with Blogger.com.
     
The Godfather
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Dec 21, 2009, 12:53 PM
 
Can all of Google's free services be paid with advertising? They better start monetizing, but without alienating all their users towards Yahoo/Bing.
     
besson3c
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Dec 21, 2009, 03:58 PM
 
I disagree with the article.

To understand how Google monetizes their web services I think you have to look at things from the top down (i.e. their relationship with big business), not the bottom up.

Google doesn't only make money selling advertising space, they also make money selling expensive search appliances for searching private data, money licensing the use of their web apps such as Google maps, and they are able to equate eyeballs to ad value. For instance, many universities are migrating off their email services to GMail/Microsoft Live/Yahoo since they can get these services for free. Google is not dumb, they wouldn't provide university support and create tens of thousands of accounts for free. They have figured out the value of young eyeballs and how to get others to pay big bucks to put their products in front of these eyeballs.

You also have to look at the halo effect factor, much like making the iTunes store available sells iPods.

The whole open source corporate culture is pretty complex. I mean, VMWare ESXi is now free, Solaris is now free, Redhat is free, yet these respective companies generally do very well. There are more ways to make money than just selling a shrink wrapped product, and I think that Google gets this.
     
nonhuman
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Dec 21, 2009, 04:00 PM
 
Some of Google's services aren't meant to be directly monetized either. For example the voice search they offer on their mobile app is specifically there to help them train their voice-to-text algorithms that they use in many other places; an algorithm that is absolutely monetizable.
     
besson3c
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Dec 21, 2009, 04:06 PM
 
The other thing is that I think people tend to gravitate towards the notion that a site like YouTube makes money through ad space. I think even greater than this in the case of this site is their database of keywords, the comments, the account profile information, etc. If you want to put your finger on the pulse of the culture of America and other places in this world, YouTube seems like one of the best ways to do this.

I'd love to see what the bandwidth and disk costs are like for YouTube though I wonder if Google sells part of that massive physical YouTube infrastructure to companies in need?
     
downinflames68
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Dec 21, 2009, 06:16 PM
 
Speaking of which, the pop up ads on some videos on youtube = death of youtube.
     
The Godfather
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Dec 22, 2009, 01:34 AM
 
Are there any Google shareholders here? What does your CEO tell you about how the company is earning your investment back?

Originally Posted by besson3c
Google doesn't only make money selling advertising space, they also make money selling expensive search appliances for searching private data, money licensing the use of their web apps such as Google maps, and they are able to equate eyeballs to ad value. For instance, many universities are migrating off their email services to GMail/Microsoft Live/Yahoo since they can get these services for free.
You should have used an example of an organization that uses a Google service for a fee, not for free.

GOOGLE SEARCH APPLIANCE DC 2.33GHZ 6*250GB 16GB NEW NIB - eBay (item 110290269738 end time Jan-09-10 13:50:54 PST)
Has anybody seen one of these $6k-$27k things in their office? Is that service something that could be easily implemented with open source software? Would MacNN's search feature improve if they use it?
     
besson3c
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Dec 22, 2009, 11:08 AM
 
We had one at my old job... why?
     
The Godfather
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Dec 22, 2009, 06:47 PM
 
Because I've never seen one in the 3 datacenters I've visited.
     
besson3c
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Dec 22, 2009, 06:56 PM
 
I have no idea how common they are anymore, maybe they are too uncommon to be worthy to mention in my post, I don't know... I do know that one other company here used to have one (maybe they still do), and Google wanted to charge a gazillion dollars for something a shell script could have easily done. It's almost robbery the kinds of software prices you can get away setting for certain big businesses who will fork over the dough. Google only needs to sell a few of these appliances to rake in a nice profit for themselves.

Just out of curiosity, and not to challenge what you have said, which datacenters did you visit?
     
The Godfather
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Dec 23, 2009, 10:36 PM
 
They were private, and you wouldn't know them because they were less than 500 square feet each.
     
torsoboy
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Dec 24, 2009, 12:23 AM
 
Originally Posted by The Godfather View Post
They were private, and you wouldn't know them because they were less than 500 square feet each.
So you were basing your judgment of the popularity of Google appliances on a visit to 3 private data centers that were less than 500 sq feet in size?
     
Chuckit
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Dec 24, 2009, 12:47 AM
 
Originally Posted by torsoboy View Post
So you were basing your judgment of the popularity of Google appliances on a visit to 3 private data centers that were less than 500 sq feet in size?
What do you think he should base his guesses on if not his experience and the experiences people have related to him? Roll a d20?
Chuck
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