• mox@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
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    3 months ago

    YouTube, Google Search, Google Maps, Gmail, Android, Chrome, Google Drive, etc. are all money losers.

    Only if you view them in isolation. In fact, they are what enables Google’s advertising dominance, by providing detailed insight into people’s lives, thereby powering the targeted advertising of AdWords and making it as valuable as it is.

    Android is a huge money loser

    Have you forgotten about the Play Store?

    With Chrome, Google can afford to spend hundreds of millions a year developing it and then give it away for free

    We used web browsers just fine before Chrome existed, before even Google existed, and nobody was paying $79.99 for them. (In fact, Chrome was originally built upon one of the free engines.)

    I would personally be glad to see Chrome disappear, since it is now starting to cause the same problems that Internet Explorer caused more than 20 years ago. Monoculture is bad in this realm. Yes, Google does seem to pour a lot of resources into their browser, but most of that is self-interest; very little of the results are actually needed for a useful, healthy web.

    Breaking it up would be like knocking over a domino without knowing what the chain reaction would be.

    The same fear could have applied to the Bell System. I’m not worried. :)

    • merc@sh.itjust.works
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      3 months ago

      Have you forgotten about the Play Store?

      Consumers spent about $47b in revenue on the Play Store, of that Google keeps about 30% so that’s $14b. Google’s total revenue is $306 billion, so the Play Store generates only 5% of Google’s total revenue.

      https://www.businessofapps.com/data/google-play-statistics/

      We don’t know how much Android costs Google. They have to develop the OS and maintain it, they have to develop all the android apps. They have to run the servers that handle the traffic from the apps, and so-on.

      We used web browsers just fine before Chrome existed

      Between 1999 when Netscape was acquired by AOL and when Chrome was launched in 2008, Internet Explorer absolutely dominated browser user share.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars

      before even Google existed, and nobody was paying $79.99 for them

      No, but Netscape had planned to start charging for their browser, until Microsoft drove them out of business by bundling IE for free with Windows, illegally leveraging their monopoly to drive the company out of business. Microsoft was willing to give away IE for free because they thought it was strategically important to control the Internet, and were willing to take a huge loss on the browser business to do that. They used the money from Office / Windows to subsidize their free browser, which was illegal.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp.

      • mox@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
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        3 months ago

        Consumers spent about $47b in revenue on the Play Store,

        The article you linked actually says, “Consumers spent $47 billion on Google Play apps and games in 2023.” Google’s 30% of that every year can easily fund something like Android. And that doesn’t even count the advertising revenue from free apps on the Play Store, nor the additional reach into people’s lives that it provides, which translates to even more income from their highly targeted advertising platform.

        We don’t know how much Android costs Google.

        And yet you insist that Android is a huge money loser.

        Internet Explorer absolutely dominated browser user share.

        And?

        They used the money from Office / Windows to subsidize their free browser, which was illegal.

        Sigh… I don’t know what point you’re trying to make with all these tangential comments. If it’s to support your notion of a hypothetical “domino effect” making a Google breakup dangerous, I don’t think you’ve succeeded.