Riffing on this: another aspect of how business-life is harder for Google is, who actually is the customer?
For Amazon (at least in the classic retail sense), the customer is clear and obvious: the person buying a thing from your website, who wants good-selection, cheap and fast/delivered to their door. It's relatively easy to orient your entire company around the question of: "but is this actually good for The Customer?" That is, until you feel you've established your business model well enough, that you no longer need to focus on creating customer value, and instead turn towards growing your business value (i.e. the shift of 3p sellers going from "gee this is a cool way to expand selection for customers beyond what Amazon 1p offers by itself", into "wow this is just a cesspool for fakes and fraud, but who cares since they all pay fees to Amazon").
For Google, with the nature of the search business and the fact that it is their primary cash cow, the incentives are "mixed" to put it mildly. The true customer of Google is not the users, but the advertisers. The users are simply an ingredient to be fed into the advertising engine -- any decisions you make to benefit the user, are only from the perspective of, not pissing them off so much that they leave your platform (and even that, is a sliding scale depending on the viability of alternatives -- Bing along wasn't very viable, but Bing + ChatGPT might be...).
In a twisted way, maybe comparing Google to Amazon is more like this:
- G's search users = A's warehouse workers
- G's advertisers = A's shoppers
How well does Amazon treat its warehouse workers? Only as well as needed to achieve 2 goals: not break employment laws too egregiously, and not churn through the entire employable labor pool too quickly.
Bell Labs and like we’re throwing money at a wall too without a clear customer and yet they still invented the transistor, the PC, digital video cameras and so on.
Wtf is Google doing? They don’t make good products and they don’t invent that much useful stuff. They’re like the rich kid with a bunch of money trying random different things without focusing on one thing to get good at it.
I’m sure at this point Google is just a system to finally pay engineers a lot of money so they can retire earlier. Everyone that I’ve ever known that wants to work for Google is doing it to cash out, myself included.
All good points, and it's even worse for Google: the websites providing ad inventory are another important customer. And their needs (more traffic) are in conflict with end users doing a search (get answer quickly).
For Amazon (at least in the classic retail sense), the customer is clear and obvious: the person buying a thing from your website, who wants good-selection, cheap and fast/delivered to their door. It's relatively easy to orient your entire company around the question of: "but is this actually good for The Customer?" That is, until you feel you've established your business model well enough, that you no longer need to focus on creating customer value, and instead turn towards growing your business value (i.e. the shift of 3p sellers going from "gee this is a cool way to expand selection for customers beyond what Amazon 1p offers by itself", into "wow this is just a cesspool for fakes and fraud, but who cares since they all pay fees to Amazon").
For Google, with the nature of the search business and the fact that it is their primary cash cow, the incentives are "mixed" to put it mildly. The true customer of Google is not the users, but the advertisers. The users are simply an ingredient to be fed into the advertising engine -- any decisions you make to benefit the user, are only from the perspective of, not pissing them off so much that they leave your platform (and even that, is a sliding scale depending on the viability of alternatives -- Bing along wasn't very viable, but Bing + ChatGPT might be...).
In a twisted way, maybe comparing Google to Amazon is more like this:
- G's search users = A's warehouse workers
- G's advertisers = A's shoppers
How well does Amazon treat its warehouse workers? Only as well as needed to achieve 2 goals: not break employment laws too egregiously, and not churn through the entire employable labor pool too quickly.