That's the trap with MBA and accountant ways of seeing costs and profit centers: They know the price of everything and the value of nothing. They are the people who laud executives that spin-off businesses like HP getting rid of Agilent, or IBM getting rid of the PC business, or companies cost cutting by closing research centers because they don't really understand how REAL economic value is built in the long run versus financial and accounting shenanigans devised to fool a market composed of short-term obsessed idiot-savants.
Gmail may not be very profitable by itself or even a net negative, but it is definitely a centerpiece of google's business.
For a sizable portion of humanity, Google is the default provider of their digital identity, something they leveraged even more with Android.
I see a lot of the same thought process when things go away. But , take meta for example , spending billions on the metaverse - most lean towards that being a fools errand and a waste of money. Research and investment doesn’t always lead to where the final destination was expected. Personally I’m glad some companies like meta still push money to research and development because it can lead to cool things in the future that were not intended.
I feel people would be more “forgiving” of zucc’s spending in the meta verse if he had just done it instead of renaming the company and trumpeting it as the second coming of God himself.
This is a tough one. Based on what we've seen so far the Metaverse seems unlikely to succeed and will likely end up as a massive boondoggle. Yet, it is so ambitious that anything less than a full fledged pivot would indicate it was just a niche thing to be abandoned. Not going all-in could be seen as a self-fulfilling prophecy that it was doomed to fail. I can definitely see how it was an all or nothing decision.
Concur on probability of failure here. Want to add that Meta does need to bet the farm on a personal device that they're able to track and monetize in the way that iOS and Android offer their corporate parents.
Without a device in every hand/household Meta simply pays rent to Tim and Sundar and, as ATT demonstrated, is up for eviction at any time. Meta needs a hit device to survive.
It depends on what your definition of the Metaverse is. The metaverse is not a Facebook / Meta exclusive platform. It's simply AR / VR with a connection to the internet. Most people, who have fallen for Meta's marketing and haven't used modern VR within the last 2 years, don't seem to realize this. No one company can singlehandedly control the entire internet, even if just the VR / AR side of it. That only happens in fantasy novels like Ready Player One.
Meta, the company, might not seem to have great prospects for now; but the metaverse is still the future despite its current clunky form factor and high cost (with the exception of the Quest 2).
In defense of Zuck, I agree with sklargh. Solely relying on ad revenue is a future dead end. Facebook needs its own hardware platform to survive.
I thought he was forced to rename the company due to some anti-trust law suit. Something about facebook being a monopoly and having to restructure some things
I feel that it had more to do with Facebook’s toxic brand from the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The Quest 2 is actually a good video game platform that so few people actually tried instead of just panning it due to Facebook’s notoriety
Yes and we get to watch on TikTok, Reels and YouTube legions of Oculus users falling to punching their family members in the face while playing. The recent one with grandma https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=690843345659240
All these videos though could be a good thing for Meta and Oculus's adoption..there were tons of other videos with the Nintendo Wii with users throwing their controllers and breaking things.
May be they have Gmail open on a tab for 6h a day? I don't know that I would say that's "being on Gmail". Google can send them notifications, but they're not generating useful data during all that time.
If you are signed into Gmail, Google can know every website you visit if the site uses Google Analytics or Google Ads (which the majority of website do today).
I'm sure the report is legit considering it's by Adobe, but I'm having a hard time believing it.
Doesn't leave much room for anything else in the day there if people are spending that much time on it. Especially since that doesn't seem to account for any social media or online chat (Slack, Teams) or other internet time either.
Even when my job had a good chunk of responding to emails I don't think I spent more than an two hours a day on it.
As for personal emails I think I spend maybe 20 minutes a day on that, mostly just quickly glancing at notifications that show up there and clicking through if necessary. And work emails I'm probably at about 10 minutes at my current job, I don't get that many and the ones I do get don't require much time or a response.
Although my situation is likely atypical. Still the average seems like the polar opposite to me, and should be the high, not the average.
And sometimes that unprofitable part of the business really is just pissing billions of dollars a year away with very little to show for it.
In Gmail's case, it would seem to be pretty tied into the parts of Goggle's business that actually do make money.
Conversational assistants? I don't know. They don't seem to have really panned out for the most part and I'm not sure they're much changed from at least five years ago in spite of vast armies of expensive developers being paid to work on them. At some point you just admit that a bet isn't going to pay off in an interesting time horizon.
> Conversational assistants? I don't know. They don't seem to have really panned out for the most part and I'm not sure they're much changed from at least five years ago in spite of vast armies of expensive developers being paid to work on them.
A small company working on the same problem with passionate skilled devs would do better imo, albeit lacking the brand recognition of Google or apple. I feel like Google _could_ do much better in this space if they really wanted to; but do they want to
Voice recognition is actually quite good. The problem is that the assistants aren't "smart" enough to actually do much that's useful with that voice recognition. And I suspect that, for a lot of things, voice alone just isn't that great either for input or output.
It's essentially another AI problem where surprisingly good isn't necessarily all that useful.
The speech recognition itself is pretty amazing right now but the command system, with one statement one action and capability via third party integrations puts some constraints on usefulness I feel. I have seen at least one example of Google neutering the capability of its assistant in order to pursue other ends. Which was playing albums on YouTube via voice which they now hide behind YouTube prime.
> The problem is that the assistants aren't "smart" enough to actually do much that's useful with that voice recognition.
You'd be right if you were only discussing Alexa, Siri, or some lesser known assistants like Kortana; but Google's assistant is pretty decent at understanding your requests.
Voice recognition is great. Doctors can dictate notes while on the potty or getting a glass of water or walking the hallway between patients. Let's also not forget the benefits for disabled or elderly.
There is an easy exit strategy for Google (and Amazon), and Google has already done it for Gmail: put a reasonable cap on how much users are allowed to use (storage for Gmail, # of queries for Alexa) and charge for anything on top of that. As server-side hardware costs decrease, wait for that "billion dollar curse" to asymptotically approach zero over the course of a few years.
Exactly. Google has slowly but steady cuts the cap on the service. They've started with Google Photos which (I guess) is the 2nd most used personal service for Android users after Gmail, and they will continue to do so by putting more and more limits on storage, so it wouldn't be directly paying for Gmail but paying in general.
A lot of the time you don’t even notice the limits. They started counting google docs to your storage limit when previously it was uncounted. But unless you are abusing the service as a file storage, it’s still effectively unlimited.
There’s probably a 1% of users who use more than the other 99% added up and quotas cut down on that.
Exactly. Some members of my family have run into this in 2022, after I recommended Google Photos as an automatic backup for their phone a few years ago. They don't get Gmail when storage is full, something I thought would never happen with Gmail.
Just yesterday I decided to investigate why I was near my storage limit on Google. Google Photos turned out to be a major culprit. Some photos were connected to my blog--I use Blogger--but a bunch were backups from years ago that somehow got synced from my phone.
But in spite of having thousands of email messages, Gmail wasn't taking up much room at all.
You may have synced photos at some point, perhaps unknowingly. Or you may have some large media files on Drive. There are mays to search for large files although Google doesn't make it especially easy or intuitive.
I remember someone on HN pointing out that Google reserves the right to delete YouTube videos without cause in the YouTube ToS. It was posited that they may eventually begin to remove unpopular or unwatched videos to save on costs.
But if they're not being watched, they don't consume bandwidth. YouTube's costs for hosting a video scale quite linearly with revenue derived from said video.
Is storage really that expensive at Google scale that this would constitute a real cost saving measure after engineering overhead of implementation and PR backlash?
YouTube stores at least 7ish copies of every video (different resolutions) and people record higher quality footage than they used and people have moved more away from bitrate-light vlogs to bitrate-heavy gaming videos.
And when you consider that hard drives have stagnated in price over the past few years, YouTube is doomed if it does not delete unprofitable videos. Unless prices to host content goes down, the whole thing becomes a sort of ponzi.
For a video that is viewed rarely enough they could store one (replicated) copy instead of seven (replicated) copies. Or turn off replication for six of those seven resolutions.
Yes but presumably there are storage replicas for each version of the video.
The suggested idea, which Google might already do, is to keep the low quality videos in less redundant storage on the theory that they can be re-encoded from the more durably stored original video if the underlying storage fails.
>And when you consider that hard drives have stagnated in price over the past few years, YouTube is doomed if it does not delete unprofitable videos
Not necessarily, is storage(and not retrieval) that much of a cost? and if so is youtube's revenue/storage cost actually decreasing? and if it is would the backlash for deleting people's videos worth the reputational cost? especially when you have an entire industry around small people trying to get big, the majority of which will never get there.
Youtube even tried putting a limitation on non-premium users watching 4k video and pulled back on it, can't imagine something as drastic as deleting videos would be worth it.
Cost of storage and cost of storage with a somewhat dependable backup strategy are two very different numbers. Chances are this "delete without naming a reason" clause resolves precisely to videos that won't be missed by many can get relegated to available until taken by bitrot without Google losing face.
Likely multiple stages downhill, from multiple site redundancy to single site but multiple hosts to multiple drives on a single host to single drive but still copied over if the drive reaches some scheduled EOL before of failure. Perhaps there's even a very last stage, available as long as that one drive is still powered up.
In addition, they've started collecting data _around_ gmail. You cannot sign up without a phone number now. They can absolutely do what they want with that phone number without breaking their promise to use your email for advertising.
I think the article has a point, but is overselling it as bigger than it actually is.
Aren't all of their services already just using your allotted Drive space? You get 15 gigs for free and it's shared with mail, photos, etc. At least I can clearly see my mail data digging into that number.
In case of Amazon just stop selling devices or increasing their price will reduce usage and cost.
For both Amazon and Google slowly degrading quality of service will decrease the usage and cost without too much repetitional damage. They can increase advertisement on their respective services, reduce servers capacity leading to higher latencies, cut R&D leaving only maintenance teams.
> Koomey's Law says compute costs will be ~1/16th / ~7% in a decade.
Probably worse, Koomey's law is an observation based on the effects of Dennard scaling (constant power density while doubling transistor count due to scaling), and this pretty much ended over a decade ago due to no longer being possible to scale transistors in a uniform way.
Power improvements will continue due to other one off process improvements, and due to other factors such as architectural improvements or moving more things into hardware, but the trend is not going to be as pronounced or consistent as it was before.
I did not say transistor count, I said power density due to transistor scaling. There is a difference, transistor counts have continued to increase since 10 years ago for other reasons, but it no longer comes with the implicit power density and switching speed improvements of dennard scaling underlying the original moors law projection. It also doesn't have the same road ahead of it since transistors are no longer uniformly scaling, and dies can't grow exponentially.
> First one has 98k points, second one has 8k points.
Why do you think that is?
What are "points", how have CPUs changed since 2012? and How did 2012 CPUs change since 2002? i.e what are the qualitative differences between these periods that are made opaque by "points", and which are key in indicating improvement projections.
But Koomey's Law say nothing for the cost. It just states energy usage for the same computation would be ~7% in a decade. There is also hardware acquisition cost or datacenter building cost, which is definitely not decreasing at that rate.
>If Google isn’t making any money from you on Gmail
Isn't Gmail the core pillar of Google's ad network? Whoever is logged into Gmail tells Google who is using an IP address.
Facebook is the other ad network because they can also link requests to ids.
Facebook can monetize Instagram because they can sell targeted ads. Likewise, Google can monetize Youtube. If ads can be sold without those ids, Instagram and Youtube could have grown on their won.
Is this an emperor's clothing situation and nobody talks about this or do I have a complete misunderstanding of ad technology?
> Isn't Gmail the core pillar of Google's ad network?
Absolutely. GMail is the main reason people are logged into their Google account all the time on their computers and mobile devices. It is absolutely essential for tracking.
> We do not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads
If you have a work or school account, you will never be shown ads in Gmail.
> When you use your personal Google account and open the promotions or social tabs in Gmail, you'll see ads that were selected to be the most useful and relevant for you. The process of selecting and showing personalized ads in Gmail is fully automated. These ads are shown to you based on your online activity while you're signed into Google, however we do not process email content to serve ads.
I know a company that once worked on an unannounced product, X, a few years ago. At the time, you could Google "who made X," and Google would correctly show you that company. It was a start-up size business using GSuite, so far too unlikely to be a lucky guess by Google.
This caused no damage as the public needed to know what X was to Google it, and it was unannounced. But it was suspicious. Either Google was scanning GSuite Gmail or Drive accounts, or perhaps someone stored a document on or sent an email to a personal Google account with some keywords. How these things happen is always very opaque with companies like Google.
Our maybe an internal page was accidentally externally accessible, someone internal visited it in Chrome, and the URL got added to the list of things to scrape.
I've see this without Gsuite vector. Could be employees logged in to personal device and leaking through those interactions. Or email to external investors, consultants, or contractors? Send something out to your external translation or localization team, ad agency, or copy editor? Difficult not to have some leakage.
All of these could be true. However, the start-up was using GSuite a lot. It constituted about 90% of the company's interactions with Google. It's impossible to certainly know what happened since Google can't be asked where it got its data.
End-to-end encryption with keys only you control is really the only type that matters from a privacy point of view. Encryption at rest or in transit behind the scenes helps protect against some actors but does not give you privacy.
The zero-setup encryption offered by cloud providers is also smoke and mirrors. It's a key they control, so while it may improve security against someone internal snooping on a raw SAN device it doesn't do much for your privacy.
In most cases the same information you can glean from someone’s email inbox, you can likely glean the same accuracy by looking at their google search history.
I would guess Google doesn’t read emails because the data is more difficult to parse (there’s a lot of it) and, when compared to intent based interests that can be gleaned from your google searches, the value of the content in your inbox is lower than most people think.
> Whoever is logged into Gmail tells Google who is using an IP address.
Google already has most people's IP address through search. Google is just providing free email because they want control, and I am willing to bet that it would be very hard to make profit, both direct or indirect, through gmail.
Without the Google login, Google has a bunch of 32-bit numbers from people’s search activity. With gmail, they now know a lot more about what’s behind those 32-bit numbers.
Let's remember that Gmail opened the door for Google to become the default identity provider for many people. A lot of consumer and behavioral data can be inferred from every service account tied via OAuth to google.
Were you searching for homes to buy? You'll probably use your google account. Bought a couple of home automation devices, cameras, and doorbells? Chances are you are using a google login.
Use Waze in your car? Now google knows what car you drive and the places where you go and can tie it nicely with all other pieces of data because you are using your google account.
This is invaluable for them. From your usage of a google account, they can infer your family arrangements, probably what your job is, your income and wealth level, tastes and habits.
They may be paying to be the first option in "choose your email provider" lists. Although Apple's Mail.app (both iOS and macOS) offers their own and Microsoft's services before Google's.
For Google, the easiest way to gain new GMail users is to not deliver mail coming to existing users from 3rd party services or to throw it into trash/spam folders for no reason.
I’m describing using telemetry correlating which IP addresses/devices have used specific gmail accounts, nothing to do with the contents of those emails.
The gmail account just as a correlation ID has a ton of value in search.
The data from Gmail isn't what's valuable to Google, it's the fact that targeted ads are more profitable and Google can target you with ads accurately because you logged in and identified yourself to access Gmail.
Google did make money providing email for one of my companies with G Suite. Then something screwed up happened that disrupted service, their support was worse than useless, and I will never pay for any non-advertising Google product ever again.
The importance of individual data points (the viability of specific products etc) is debatable. What is not debatable, and quite astonishing if you take a step back, is that the majority of tech infrastructure of the recent era, and a major part of total "value creation" as per public markets is based on a random agglomeration of business models. Some of them positively despised and progressively hemmed in by regulation, others unviable on a standalone basis etc.
Its not clear if the way the mess will resolve is reverting back to true "big tech" where we pay for tech (as opposed to big adtech or big ecommerce providing tech as a sideshow) or is some other pattern will emerge.
The astonishing amount of freebies points on the one hand on the increasingly low cost of tech, on the other hand on the enormous commercial benefit of extracting value from user behavior.
What will be the new equilibrium and will it in any sense feel "right" and sustainable? Its a trillion dollar question.
Google and Amazon could just charge subscriptions. paying for email might be a hard pill to swallow, but paying for youtube ad free, drive, docs, photos and everything else.. sounds reasonable.
Amazon already has prime. just require it for alexa.
i don't know how they can add those fees now but it would have been reasonable if they just started that way instead of crossing their fingers Hoping they'd find a way to monetize in the future
I’d pay $12/year for gmail. That would give Google the revenue they need to keep everything humming along. I’ve been living with free e-mail for almost 25+ years now, but a dollar a month would be easy to rationalize for the service.
I won't, unless I'm the customer, and get to speak to a human when my email is down.
Right now I'm the product and so I have no expectation of customer service. When I'm paying 1 dollar a month I'm holding someone liable if I lose access to my account.
And, legally, I can reasonably take Gmail to court for monetary loss and f I am a paying customer. 200k people going to small claims court for whatever will completely wipe out any profit that alphabet hopes to make of Gmail.
So, yeah, it's cheaper for Gmail to provide free accounts with no liability than to get caught up in mandatory customer protection laws.
I'm already paying a little more than that per year for 100GB of Drive storage. It gives me a highly durable backup that's accessible from anywhere. I would happily pay a similar amount for gmail.
The dominant business model for tech is telecom and cable subscriptions, Microsoft sales, asset purchase from Dell/HP/Apple/Cisco, and cloud services (leased capacity). Instead of subsidized newspaper, junk mail, and air tv infrastructure we get subsidized Google drive. Instead of air conditioned shopping malls we get subsidized shipping. Nothing new under the sun.
I view voice assistants as Silicon Valley’s version of the $5 Costco Rotisserie chicken or $2 Costco hotdog.
I am more willing to pay for Amazon Prime and its music service is more useful to me. I also enjoy Fire TV cube because it is voice controlled. I can say the same for voice controls on Google TV and Apple TV, especially for Android Car and Apple Car Play.
It’s a loss leader that makes sense just like discounted soda that you place in the back of a supermarket, so you can force your customers to check out your other deals
google home happily plays Spotify tho. it doesn't work any better or worse with YouTube music. is it really bringing additional revenue to their other services?
> google home happily plays Spotify [...] is it really bringing additional revenue to their other services?
It will once Google removes Spotify and all other third party alternatives to their own services.
I'm typically against monopolistic practices that favor massive platforms, but this actually seems fully justified given that these voice control devices are losing so much money. I think it's fair for both Amazon Alexa and Google Home to be made incompatible with third party services. I'd rather them do this than see the devices wither on the vine.
Just tell the regulators that the services and their associated hardware are losing money and that they'll be forced to shut down unless the companies can promote their own platforms exclusively.
If Google and Amazon make this move to drop third party support at the same time, they won't have to worry about losing customers to the other home automation product. (Just make sure that it isn't collusion!)
I have no idea if this happens or not, but I imagine it is trivial to monitor bluetooth and wifi beacon probes to identify all people who walk into a physical space.
Similarly, I have no idea if it is possible but I imagine it is trivial to link purchases, especially if they require showing a membership card, with identity, and feed all that into a CRM / customer identity database.
It'd be kinda silly to run a large scale retail operation without doing these things, honestly.
The chicken / hot dog reference is to a USA based "big box" store that sells these things (meat products) at cost / loss as a form of advertising to get customers in the door. That chain also requires that people be "members" of the club prior to letting them in the store.
If I have a bunch of Alexa enabled devices I'd be really wary.
Amazon usually does a decent job of continuing support. But by their own admission they have written off $10B and followed by massive layoffs predominantly in Alexa divisions. Alexa infrastructure is massive and it'll be now put on life support. Mind you that even on life support the infrastructure is incurring massive costs with zero $$ revenue. Perhaps only critical security updates will be rolled out. So expect things to break around the edges, at first.
Maybe Amazon will rollout Alexa specific subscription? Otherwise I just don't see how to justify the running costs.
But it’s not zero revenue. If you’re asking Alexa to play something on Amazon’s music app, they’re getting revenue from your music subscription. They just need to understand where the revenue is coming from and allocate it accordingly. For setting a timer, yeah, there’s no revenue, but people are also unlikely to pay for it, so maybe they could cut out that functionality.
Pretty much the only thing I use my Alexas for is timers (for cooking) and the weather.
You're right that I wouldn't pay for just that functionality directly, but I pay for Prime, and spend a fair chunk on AWS every month. And if amazon abandons Alexa then I'll just move everything to another ecosystem.
> if amazon abandons Alexa then I'll just move everything to another ecosystem.
Why? I'm not an Alexa user, but I am a Prime and AWS user. I don't understand how having a voice interface for weather reports impacts your decision for cloud computing or package delivery. Additionally, what other ecosystem would you move to? Google or Microsoft because they offer both voice interfaces and cloud computing? Why does that impact Prime?
I really don't see how these three things are linked in your mind. I could see some link if you used AWS to provide custom Alexa services, or used Alexa to play Prime content (music, audio books) but you specifically said you don't use Alexa for anything other than two really generic use cases.
Could be that Amazon rolls Alexa into Prime. Even now, most of the time with my Echo Show, I get ads for Amazon services, Prime etc. Its always trying to upsell me. Worse than a used car salesman.
I don't use Alexa. How much of their compute is in the cloud? Do they do all voice recognition in the cloud? If the voice recognition was done on local hardware you could get Alexa down to the moral equivalent of a hobby for Amazon without much work. There are open source projects that are nearly the equivalent with nearly no server resources, or ones so minimal they essentially run for free. But if all the voice recognition is done in the cloud they're in big trouble, because even the minimum size the service can have is huge.
Probably another victim of the end of 0% interest rates is the idea that we can force everything into "the cloud" and run it indefinitely, funded by the whiffs and vapors of whatever possible value we can extract (without running afoul of privacy laws or angry customers if they find out) in the fractions of a cent per month or year range. Compute has gotten cheap but it's still not free, and "the cloud" is still overwhelmingly outweighed in power by "not the cloud". Plus the compute tasks keeps getting larger and larger; it doesn't do "the cloud" any good if people smoothly transition from wanting voice recognition to wanting GPT-type chatbots and cloud video gaming and other things that you can't serve 50,000 people from a single beefy computer.
I've been resisting a lot of cloud-level computation in my life, where even where I permit it I retain the ability to do my own thing, like serve my own videos in my house. I've really been more concerned about data ownership but this has factored in, too; I'm abundantly endowed with more computing resources at home than I can use, but all these free or cheap cloud services are remote (adding latency) and incentivized to short change the resources because they are expensive. The ad-based economy still doesn't pay enough to fund reasonable levels of performance; Facebook's profits couldn't afford a Raspberry Pi's level of performance dedicated to you in a year, let alone what I have sitting around the house. Even as computing becomes cheap in the cloud, the computing in my house is also becoming cheap, and I'm not even particularly trying to have a lot of it. Trying to keep up with it in a centralized system picking up a penny here and a penny there is not something that can be sustained without free money.
> How much of their compute is in the cloud? Do they do all voice recognition in the cloud?
Their voice assistance is constantly learning so a good chunk of voice recognition related computation takes place in cloud.
However, even if the voice recognition is done locally, the vast majority of responses are streamed from the cloud. Only trivial requests such as "Set timer" can be handled locally.
As of 2019, Amazon had sold 100 million Alexa devices. Whichever way I look at it, those many devices incur a big running cost at the backend cloud to service.
Thank you for the info. This post is just further noodling, not any sort of disagreement.
"Responses" streamed from the cloud differ a lot in terms of whether or not it's some sort of "API" response that could be a couple of cheap kilobytes of JSON, or a full text-to-speech audio file.
I can't speak to Alexa, but I do use Google Maps, and it obviously has two modes for its TTS; a slightly nicer mode that streams from the cloud if you're on the network, but a perfectly serviceable lower quality one generated from the device if it can't get to the cloud at the time. I've often wondered why they don't just put the nicer cloud model on my device. Maybe when Maps was first starting it was a big difference, but now I'm sure my cell can run that "nice" model just as well. It's not like they're running a massive multi-billion parameter thing that only runs on the latest graphics cards (or, if they are, they aren't getting that much additional value for it), I'm sure it's something we could run locally just fine.
Learning could always be done by sampling some things to send up.
For sure I agree with your overarching assessment though.
The irony, as you noted, is even as consumer devices have gotten more and more powerful computation and processing is being pushed to the backend/cloud. For example; to get a EC2 that's comparable with my laptop one has to pay through the nose. But still most of my machine's CPU cycles is idling and is used for rendering webpages. To make matters worse, most of the tools now a days are web only. Even if I want to use there's no app. There are exceptions of course such as IntelliJ, Figma etc., but sadly they should be the norm but aren't.
To me, it feels as if because bandwidth got cheaper engineers just got lazy and stopped having to think to take advantage of client device's capabilities. It's gotten so bad that most of the apps wouldn't even start without internet connection.
I think an Alexa-specific subscription for non-Prime members would be viable. It always seemed strange to me that they combine the free shipping with a streaming video service in one bundle. It wouldn't make it any stranger to bundle Alexa service in there too.
Uh, google cloud is growing like 40% year on year, and its losses are not.
You could call those losses investment, and compare it to how Amazon took over the world (pre AWS) without making a profit.
Consistently growing 40% year on year is expensive. It doesn't mean it's not doing great.
It's not losses, it's investments for continuing the exponential growth in revenue. When that investment is not needed because market saturation, this can quickly flip to billions in profit.
We don't know if they're charging less than it costs to run. They probably simply have to make investments this year in order to acquire revenue next year. Or at the very least it's a large factor.
They could choose to not grow, and instead realize it as profit, but it's not a long term good move.
It's probably a good idea to spend $4B (made up number) this year in order to be able to grow revenues next year by $11B. (some simplified arithmetic based on Q3's $6.868B revenue times 4 for the year)
And then next year $5.6B to acquire $15B the year after.
The nature of exponential growth (anyone who's started a growing company would know this) is that the investment that was expensive this year could easily be paid by the same company next year.
Assuming Google can avoid investing the $4B with current customer base, that would take them over a billion into profitable territory.
Again, have a look at how Amazon did this the last ~20 years.
You can't spin up a DC the same month you find out you need the capacity. It just cannot be done. You need to take into account the time axis.
I'm looking forward to the Q4 earnings report. We live in interesting times, though. The USD exchange rate due to the wider economy has significantly affected the earnings of multinational conglomorates as expressed in USD, lately.
The death of Gmail would make a whole lot of companies realize they should stop tying account identity to an email address (rather than something like a username), which would be nice.
No one wants to have to remember a million usernames. At least your email is ensured to be available for use on every site you sign up on so it’s only one thing to remember.
In a few cases I generate nicks or totally random user names but only if the other users of the service see my nick/username.
In those services and in all the other ones I still have to give them my email to confirm the accounts and actions like replacing that email with a new one. Or login with OAuth, if one does that sort of things, which is back to giving our email to somebody else.
I could also be hit by a car, get cancer, have cosmic rays wipe my hard drive, etc. Getting permanently locked out of my email is an event so unlikely it’s not worth thinking about.
Happened to me recently due to a circular dependency issue between Google and LastPass.
Both of which I pay for.
Turns out losing both my laptop and my phone simultaneously was enough to lock me out of both forever - LP wanted me to click a link sent to my email to login from a new device, and said email account (GSuite) required a password stored in LastPass.
Sorry to hear that happened to you. I do remember losing my password for an old domain awhile ago, but I remember it being straight forward and giving me quite a few options to recover it (security questions, backup phone number to send 2FA codes, etc).
Maybe double check the "try another way" login options and maybe one of them will help you get back in.
But you have to remember a million passwords, or have a password manager remember them for you. (You don't just use the same password everywhere, right?) You could do the same with user names. Sites that use your email address as a login credential and also display your username to the public already separate the two, so there's no additional complexity there.
They’d probably either jump straight to requiring a phone number or ssn and try to write it off as “there’s no other way to verify you’re a real person.” We seem to be going this way already.
SSN would be illegal (in California at least) and phone number comes with the exact same set of problems. Despite all the carping about using email as login, I’ve never seen a better solution offered.
Most services like to spam users mailboxes with promotions and marketing material for their company, in addition, handling lost password requests would be quite a bother without the requirement that a user ties an e-mail address to an account.
Gmail isn't completely free. If you cross about 15GB of total storage across drive, photos, gmail and anything else ( youtube is exempt) you start paying.
Now, while the cost to provision a GB of storage keeps dropping Google's prices haven't been revised down ever (from what I can remember).
I pay for Google storage and know of a several others who do the same. I suspect the number of paying users is growing
Yeah I recently started to pay for it too, after using many 12+ years with free storage. It was relatively low cost compared to Dropbox (etc), so it was a natural move. No more stressing over about deleting photos from Google Photos, and I configured that extra space to use as a backup endpoint too (using Duplicati with Google Drive).
Probably one of the best value online services I paid for.
I recently reached a critical mass on my Google storage (95%+ full), and almost all of it was gmail, with less than 1.5gb for drive/photo. I decided to delete 5gb+ of emails instead of paying. I already had all of my file storage/backup needs taken care of, and I had plenty of emails that were providing me no additional value.
Years ago, a dear friend who used to run his own servers, and was even on the board of one of those Internet public interest nonprofits... gave up and moved his email to GMail.
Now, I'm still self-hosting, but most of my private email is nevertheless being archived and farmed by a company, because almost everyone I talk with is using them. Sigh.
Most of my non-professional emails are notifications from services, like purchases or whatever. Personal communication is almost 100% in chat apps nowadays. I suspect it's the case for most people.
Same. Fastmail has good migration tools for moving your email off gmail. Probably the same for other similar vendors, but I’ve only moved off gmail once.
And ... welcome to the transition from competitive Electricity providers to regulated utility.
We will end up seeing something like the "Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935" but this really was focused on electricity providers that crossed US State lines - and I suspect something something international concerns will
mean a conglomerates regulation approach and leave us with about three or four more or less seperate internets with different regulatory regiemes.
I mean, if they want me to run the Alexa infra on my own systems so I don't have to send anything to Amazon they're very welcome to it. But I'm guessing they want that sweet juicy data.
I'm glad I ended up going with a paid e-mail service. They have to keep improving and maintaining quality of service because if they don't, customers will simply go elsewhere. And I know they won't suddenly disappear as long as they have a solid number of users. If they gathered and sold info, people would immediately leave them as well.
All of those make their interests and mine line up, so I don't need to have faith in them to entrust them with my email.
As a sidenote:
Reminds me of the situation with UberEats and DoorDash, though they're not free services.
People like these services. In terms of raw users, they're enormous. DoorDash has something like 25 million users.
But they're absolutely burning money. An average of $250 million a year for DoorDash, and sometimes as high as $400 million.
But investors keep dumping money into it, because clearly there is enormous demand. And if there's demand, there must be some way to make it profitable.
But none of them have noticed that the unit economics don't work. No customer is willing to pay the true price of the food, the delivery and even very minimal overhead. If they charged enough to break even, the demand would completely fall out.
But we've had paid delivery services for decades before the internet even existed, so it's not that customers don't want to pay.
What doesn't seem to work, which is a bit surprising, is centralizing the deliveries to reduce costs.
The delivery services should be making their money out of those centralized cost savings, but can't. So instead it's coming out of the food, which means the restaurants rise their prices, etc.
My local chippy has four different prices depending on which platform you order it through, which vary by up to 60%!
Why they can't make money out of the centralization is the real question. I know in the UK they seem to be spending huge amounts on prime-time advertising. Central office headcount could be another reason. Call me cynical but I would also bet a lot of takeaways would avoid a lot of tax on cash orders, which you just can't do when it's all recorded electronically.
The difference is all in what is being delivered. The way customers value food is very different from if they're shipping say, a chair to their home. If a chair costs $100 and you're paying $10 to ship it, no big deal. That's 10% of the cost.
If a customer orders $10 worth of food and sees another $10 of fees, their interest in it decreases significantly - and they have many alternative ways to get food with less overhead.
You're right about restaurant-specific options though. The economics are somewhat different and may work out more favorably, though I still suspect they're taking losses for the sake of gaining customer interest. There's no way delivery costs them half a pound!
>But none of them have noticed that the unit economics don't work. No customer is willing to pay the true price of the food, the delivery and even very minimal overhead. If they charged enough to break even, the demand would completely fall out.
I thought food delivery services were profitable on a per unit basis, it was just the marketing/development spend that was causing them to go into the red?
But in the account identity settings I have to give them a backup email address that they can use to verify my identity in case of issues. That backup email address never gets any email, definitely isn't worth paying for, and is obviously a gmail address.
GMail can't go anywhere because of Android. It would need to be replaced with something nearly as comprehensive, tying accounts to 1+ phones and other devices, and authentication and recovery processes. Worst case would be switching to tiny quotas and/or message expiration.
I prefer to separate my Google account from my real email. I've got a gmail before Android because it was free but I never used it. Basically I squatted myself. It's only a spam black hole now.
If anything happens to my Google account it has no effect to my business. I might get locked out of the Play store if I won't be able to register another account with the same phone number. The worst it happens is that I have to get a new number which actually is a lot of work (banks, etc.) Does that happen?
Anyway, the less I use my account the less problems I should have, so no Gmail.
'any e-mail' account means GMail, Apple or Microsoft for the vast bulk of email addresses. Most of the rest people using their work or school email (many of which backed by Google or Microsoft). Personal domains and other providers are a relative blip.
Apple needs to provide email to users for the same reasons. They are nice enough to let people who already have a working email setup keep using it, but I suspect the bulk of iPhone users will be using their Apple mail.
Both companies are raking in money. As the article points out, Google uses gmail to sell more profitable business products. Alphabet Inc made $75 billion profit, so if it costs them $5 per user to run, it will be about a $10 billion cost.
Which is a fraction of their profit - and makes for great advertising.
I have said this many times: the Internet, as it bloomed starting around 1990 or so, was built on someone else's hardware. Usenet, sure. If you were on IRC at the time, chances are your IRC servers were .edu servers. At first the "someone else's hardware" (SEH) was largely from universities, who often had no real top-down policies about how their bandwidth and such were used. Many SPARCs were pressed into service.
Roughly a quarter of a second after the invention of the <img> tag, advertising began to be a thing. Anyone remember NetZero? The banner era began, then animated .GIFs were added, and finally the CPU-crushing Flash banner evolved. Take a moment to remember NetZero, as well as the free hours on AOL discs so numerous the US postal service shuddered.
About a thousand people invented AJAX as soon as they realized the implications of the XMLHttpRequest object. Just as the <img> tag was the four-color print for advertising, so this began an era where, with the addition of cookies, you could get more information about how your ads were received, how your viewer moved across domains, and so on. This in turn means you can ask for more money for advertising, after all you can target and track! Before it was merely exposure.
Ah, but how to know more? Well, for one, you could have the users host all of their content on your servers. First email, then photos, then video. Why not? And it's all for free. We just need to perform sophisticated analysis on your content, then decide to show you this Viagra ad anyway. This more or less ends at Cloud Computing.
I submit that the various frees and SEHs have created radical distortions in the mindset of generations when it comes to "Who pays for this, anyway?" It's certainly devalued some kinds of labor, overvalued others, and probably has some knock-on effects that we might not even immediately notice. I think the need for Cloudflare and other anti-DDoS products stems from the overly casual egress filtering of various ISPs. It's all just free stuff, anyway, let someone else pay for it. Email is "free," and we've largely dealt with spam by building some great machinery (eventually) and hiding it away from everyone, but its big brother, Internet Scam Sam, continues to slither along. We now build to scale and simply make tech support some forum where the users attempt to solve each other's problems -- they're not even interns.
I could go on and on, but my key point is that thirty-plus years of "free" has translated to "someone else's problem" and I wonder if we aren't starting to see some bills come due at last.
> Cloudflare and other anti-DDoS products stems from the overly casual egress filtering of various ISPs
This is just a natural consequence of IPs lack of a security model or access controls. If OSI had won we would be living in a world with locked down data services.
Many acted like the internet was this weightless thing, now folks are starting to see that they may have to pay the bill in some fashion. This goes for the ecological factors as well.
They're probably data collection projects, which is why the GDPR scares me just a bit.
I could easily see myself having to pay $30 a month or more for all the services that are probably funded by spying on me, if they had to use a different business model.
It's fairly bad and unsustainable to build a business around trying to get people to argue more online, so they look at your ads to buy absolute crap they don't even want, but I'm not sure what the web would look like without it.
Would we still have all the random things like Google Street View that nobody would actually pay enough for as a discrete product?
Reputable news sources seem to have already changed from ads to paywalls, presumably because ads were making the sites look too much like tabloids.
> I could easily see myself having to pay $30 a month or more for all the services that are probably funded by spying on me, if they had to use a different business model.
I think this is the problem with big tech right now. We all know an email service doesn’t cost 30/month and generate hundred billion dollar companies with $300k programmer salaries. But adtech makes it so.
The bigger mail companies seem to be slightly pricier.
Plus there's Assistant, Calendar, Tile tracking(Already a few bucks a month for proactive reminders), Keep, YoLink's cloud, WiFi Camera clouds, etc.
Some of it could be done P2P(Especially Google Assistant which only has about 5 features people use), some things would probably disappear entirely in a privacy first world, and I'm guessing the rest would be an extra $10-$30 or so to.
I don't think GDPR will prevent you from entering a contract where you sell your personal info and get paid in free access to services. It just prevents companies from doing so without your consent. Google and other could just provide ad-supported plans along with paid plans.
The only goal of GDPR is to stop the theft of personal information, it doesn't dictate a business model.
I've seen conflicting opinions on this. Some people claim that is illegal but der spiegel gives me the option of free + personalized ads or paying + ad free but I'm also in the US so it may be different for people in germany.
In a roundabout way you are saying the same thing as the person you replied to. Not enough people are going to opt for that making ad supported plans unviable for a company that is expected to have round the clock all year long growth.
GDPR itself is mostly good although it goes too far in a lot of places. I'm all for full disclosure of what they collect, and for data portability, but I'm not a fan of right to deletion, or technical requirements on how you handle even trivial data.
Plus, the GDPR doesn't allow tracking as a precondition for using the service. Which is needed for the law to mean anything at all, otherwise all the big companies would require it and you'd be disadvantaged if you refuse, but it does change the business model.
It seems like an unsolvable problem, short of some kind of government funded subsidized open source equivalent of Google or something.
The real trouble is from even stronger laws than the GDPR that many individuals want. I'm not exactly sure what the wording of those imaginary laws would be, but a huge number of people did not want Amazon Sidewalk to happen, especially as opt-out, many want tile/AirTag to stop, some people want CCTV to be totally gone, etc.
Gmail is whole ecosystem of apps, transforming your boring inbox to productivity powerhouse. Asking each app to pay (similar to Google maps API key), would be enough to cover costs of infrastructure.
Alexa, is perfect spy, to match TV Ads ID with your reactions. They're not monetizing those options because it's too early. It's seems that they can still grow, without looking at red lines.
Recent news suggests it's not for lack of trying that Alexa hasn't been monetized, and Amazon has started cutting staff as a result of the failure. People just want to buy the smart assistant, not a voice nag that tries to get them to buy more things without using their eyes. So selling devices at cost hasn't been working.
Because they need to raise prices or charge subscription fees in order to make money on it. Just making a better product without increasing prices is not going to change that they're losing billions per year on this.
I want to pay to not be the product. Especially when I purchase a product that can spy on me in my own home. They should obviously increase prices but my point is that haven’t tried to offer it. They’d rather subsidize it all with ads and not give their consumers a choice. They could offer an ad-free experience for more money if they wanted to. And still sell the existing products for the same price. But they haven’t tried yet.
I still remember when Gmail had the live counter that showed you how much disk space that was being added to your account in "real time" down in the corner back when it first launched.
I had to finally cave in last week and pony up to get rid of the "You are using 98% of your storage space!" banner across the top of my Gmail.
> We do not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads.
That's laughable - When Gmail was launched, it advertised that it would show you "relevant" text ads based on your email! That was one of its features in an era of intrusive banner and pop-up ads in many of the free email services available in the past.
While the article may have a point about Alexa and Google Cloud, Gmail cannot be clubbed with it as Gmail does have 2 viable business model - advertisements and subscriptions. Moreover, it is a virtual goldmine of personal data for any advertising platform with your banking statements, your online purchases, your work emails, your personal correspondences, your contacts etc. Anybody who believes Google isn't mining this data is living in a fool's paradise. Unless a law explicitly forbids it, with severe penalties, corporations like Google will absolutely use this data to make money - just look at the fines Google faces around the world for violating the privacy of its users.
There are laws against lying about it. So if you believe they are scanning your email but saying they're not, then you have a slam dunk case to get rich by suing them.
Edit:
Hell, Google can't keep a secret anymore without leaking it. If what you're saying were true then any employee working on the pipelines and ad targeting would easily get the evidence themselves, and sue Google. Google pays well, but not as well as winning a lawsuit.
And there are loopholes to get around it. A simple example is when other services are automatically enabled in Gmail like "personalisation", "spam detection", "priority inbox" or sorting promotional emails. All of these require scanning emails and harvesting keywords from it, for which you implicitly give permission. All this data also goes into the personal profile that Google creates for you. The ads are then served from your personal profile. So legally Google is not serving ads after "scanning your email". Why do you think you have to agree to separate terms and conditions privacy policies - Google, Gmail, Photo etc.? (This is not unique to Google. Apple also uses similar tactics - every Apple app now tells you that your data will be used for personalised ads. Services within that will have its own data collection policies "to improve service". Every bullshit "privacy" protection needs you to allow even more invasive data collection to "protect" you. And everything is "opt-in" by default (and praise the lord if you can find an "opt-out" settings at all).
I was merely objecting to people who claim that Google is lying. I have not read the ToS lately, so I don't actually know if email contents make it to your profile.
All I can do is assume that unless they say that it doesn't, then it probably does.
But if they do say that it doesn't, then I'm pretty sure it doesn't. Because especially now with GDPR they'd be completely fucked if that were not true. Max penalty 4% of global revenue per instance, or whatever it is.
Google even allows you to opt out of personalized ads. Not hard to find.
Laws and regulations are indeed the only way to prevent it. But note that GDPR applies only to EU. So even if Google is complying (and not using loopholes to avoid it) those of us who are not Europeans are still screwed. (As I pointed, the 100's of millions of dollar fines that Google is facing worldwide for its abusive practices also indicate that they are willing to violate the law / regulation if it is still profitable to do so).
What are the chances that Google starts charging $2/month (maybe lower in certain markets) for Gmail? I imagine there would be plenty of takers. Maybe not 2 billion takers, but quite a few.
They did that with grandafathered Google Apps accounts (custom domain) which remained free until last year. I bet the vast majority of them (like me) switched to the paid version
> I bet the vast majority of them (like me) switched to the paid version
I don't think that's true. Everyone I know who used custom domains with Gmail migrated away. No one paid, Google priced it just high enough that people could justify spending the time migrating.
There might have been a solution where you could keep the custom domain, if you used it for email only, but the messaging was really confusing, and many had already migrated away at that point. There may also have been issues if you hosted email for others. In my case I had my own email and that of a few family members, it wasn't clear that I could keep all the email account, or just my own. In the end I think many didn't want to deal with Google after this and just moved their domains.
There was enough of an outcry that they were forced to implement a way to keep it free if all you used was email (and checked the “noncommercial” box).
There used to be large banners and numerous emails warning about this. The deadline has passed now but you can get the “non commercial” flag enabled by going to the help center and asking for it in the chat bot.
I would pay 10 dollars a month for a ChatGPT voice assistant but as the owner of a house filled with Alexa devices, i would pay zero as alexa fails too frequently on even basic queries.
Does anyone have recommendations to get off of Gmail? I've tried in the past, but I get so much junk mail that not having gmail's auto-categorizing makes my email unusable.
This topic is discussed regularly on HN. Popular alternatives are Fastmail and protonmail (surprisingly not Outlook). I use Fastmail. I won’t touch protonmail. Their claims about privacy and encryption are mostly false and if they deceive about that, what else are they deceiving about?
Fastmail has been around for ages, much longer than protonmail, even longer than Gmail, and is completely no-nonsense. Good apps and a good web interface.
Also:
“Fastmail developers are among active contributors to the widely used Cyrus IMAP open source software project and include the lead developer and maintainer of Perl module Mail::IMAPTalk. Fastmail supported the development of the free software webmail interface Roundcube and developed JMAP – a new open email protocol.”
But fastmail is based in Australia, which means they can't be trusted for privacy/encryption following the The Assistance and Access Act/Anti-Encryption act.
This. Get over it. Your email is not private or anonymous and never will be. Once you accept that, ProtonMail's value proposition is meaningless. ProtonMail must answer to subpoenas by handing over stored emails and IP addresses, just like everyone else. Here's one example:
You're saying that Swiss-based Protonmail is worse for privacy than Australian-based (remember Australia's horrible digital privacy laws?) Fastmail? I'd love to see if you can even slightly substantiate that claim. Fastmail, by OZ law can legally be forced to allow snooping on its users without even telling them, while Protonmail has actually fought hard to stop snooping even in edge cases, yet you say you "won't touch" them? Some specific reason?
> You're saying that Swiss-based Protonmail is worse for privacy than Australian-based fastmail?
I'm claiming that neither of them are good for privacy. As a sibling wrote so well: "encrypted email just isn’t a thing. The minute you send a message to someone else it’s out in the wild."
I have zero interest in my email being encrypted or protected or anonymous. So ProtonMail's value proposition is meaningless to me. But the fact that ProtonMail masquerades and markets their email as private and encrypted is the problem. They're subject to subpoenas, just like everyone else, and if they are going to market their service as private, encrypted, or anonymous, then they are misleading at best and lying at worst:
Lots of other interesting dirt if you do some basic google searches.
So I chose Fastmail because of their honesty. I know what I'm getting. Their prices are great, apps are great, web interface is great. They've been around since 1999 -- longer than Gmail. I used their free tier first then moved to paid with a custom name some time ago. Clearly they're not going anywhere. I'm not sure what else you can ask for in an email provider?
Personally I use mailbox.org and have no issues. Fastmail seems to be a very popular option here.
It's likely that a lot of these will probably lack certain features Gmail has such as auto-categorising emails (partially due to the fact that they are not in the business of scanning your emails in the first place). I'm not sure if there are open-source tools to replace those features.
Personally, my approach would be to focus on reducing the junk mail. Moving to a new email address would give you a clean slate, at least. You can also look into AnonAddy or SimpleLogin to help prevent spam in future.
You can start with your own domain and forward to your gmail. Do regular takeouts and you are then effectively using gmail as a reader and can dump it when needed (or if they dump you it will be less painful!)
The other problem is that self-hosted email is far more likely to go to spam. I have some accounts set up with gmail only because otherwise they will never get delivered.
I'm content with a tiny service called posteo from Berlin, Germany. It's a euro per month and it offers email and calendars with a lot of focus on security.
Gmail itself has a negligible cost, when for all those users. Its pocket change for Google and not worth the risk of nationalisation to end of life it.
"Can't be monetized": news shouldn't be monetized, and neither should personal assistants that tie together personal data and control of vital home systems.
VAs are an operating system for all of the other products and services. You give away the printer or the razor handle, and charge for ink and razor blades. You give away the personal assistant, and charge for voices, ringtones, music, movies, groceries, apps, alarms, security features, and so on.
If you're spending billions upon billions running a VA that's stagnant and not very good, then you suck as a CIO/CTO and shouldn't be trusted with that sort of budget.
Gmail may not be very profitable by itself or even a net negative, but it is definitely a centerpiece of google's business.
For a sizable portion of humanity, Google is the default provider of their digital identity, something they leveraged even more with Android.