It's good to see an assumption I had, be validated. The assumption was that Linux would struggle to make a dent in the desktop market until it managed to make a tempting proposition for gamers. Projects like WINE tried, but there's just not enough you can do only with open-source contributors, with such a massive undertaking. I'm happy that a big company is finally backing this effort and with nvidia open-sourcing their gpu kernel modules, I'd say exciting times are up ahead :)
> Projects like WINE tried, but there's just not enough you can do only with open-source contributors, with such a massive undertaking.
Proton is basically just Wine, right? Aside from that CodeWeavers has been doing commercial Wine development for a long time.
Almost all of Wine already existed before Valve got involved. Yes, they help out too, and that's great, but people are hugely over-crediting Valve (and here, hugely under-crediting all those open source contributors, who did the overwhelming majority of the work).
Proton is Wine with some extra patches; the main project has some pretty hefty requirements in terms of coding standards to reduce possible regressions, which means that on the whole it can be pretty slow to get compatibility.
Gaming is just one subsection of the Win32 API that doesn't touch on all parts of said API. Proton basically has a bunch of extra patches that might introduce a regression in upstream Wine but won't in the context of videogames.
Proton patches also usually get upstreamed when they reach "proper" maturity/are fully tested if I'm not mistaken so long-term, Proton benefits the rest of the wine ecosystem too. As for the open source contributors - Valve iirc just hired some of the previously self-employed wine developers and the guy who got I think it was a Vulkan compat layer working on Linux.
I'm pretty sure Codeweavers has the same model although I don't think they upstream patches nearly as much? They're also very much more targeting business customers on Apple devices who need to run some obscure (usually old) Windows program rather than the entire scope of Win32 software.
Basically it's best to look at proton the way you sometimes get a "next generation" fork of a popular piece of FOSS - higher dev speed and more features, however more focused into keeping a single area working than on the overall health of the upstream (which does get contributed back to for the features that help the upstream).
most likely, although by now they also may be employees of valve. but valve is also working with codeweaver.
btw: i consider codeweaver somewhat the unsung hero of the linux desktop.
there is no other company in this world that stakes their success entirely on the success of the linux desktop, or maybe on the demise on the windows desktop, because wine is the only software tool that will never ever be useful running on windows.
> wine is the only software tool that will never ever be useful running on windows
Intel was actually including Wine code in their Arc graphics drivers to translate DirectX 9 calls to Vulkan, because they didn't have performant native DirectX 9 drivers. It's a pretty common trick for Arc users to drop the latest DXVK DLL into the directory of a game that is having issues with the graphics card.
Using Wine DLLs is also a good way to resurrect games built on the obsolete DirectDraw API on modern versions of Windows.
> I'm pretty sure Codeweavers has the same model although I don't think they upstream patches nearly as much?
According to Wikipedia "all changes made to the Wine source code are covered by the LGPL and publicly available", but I don't really know from first-hand experience.
That's the thing with desktop linux: almost everything already exists. But there's always an extra mile to go. Sometimes it's tiny bugs, sometimes it's bad default settings, sometimes it's questionnable UI... all things that may not be a problem for tweakers but will stop people that want a good out-of-the-box experience. I'm glad commercial companies go that extra mile.
i didn't check but i believe the major part of the extra mile is fixing 1000s of tiny little bugs that break games. it should be possible to verify that by looking at the wine changelog. the rest is creating a smooth experience downloading and running games. smoother than any alternative (like playonlinux or lutris)
Wine has worked surprisingly well for a long time, well before Valve got involved, although compatibility was never perfect of course (and still isn't!) I don't think they had to "fix 1000s of tiny little bugs that break games". Codeweavers has been selling commercial Wine-based solutions for a long time.
It's easy to offer a better experience if you also own the actual storefront; that was kind of my point.
And as I said, I'm sure Valve contributes; but describing wine as some sort of semi-usable half-working project before their involvement is rather inaccurate.
describing wine as some sort of semi-usable half-working project before their involvement is rather inaccurate
i disagree. wine worked, but many games didn't. fixing that is mostly valve's doing. and in my opinion the wine experience is still inferior compared to steam.
the problem is very much one of perception. 90% of the work that went into wine was already there. but the remaining 10% of work that was missing make up 90% of the impression of how well it is working. (the numbers are made up, but i hope you get my idea. it's the general linux desktop problem. the desktop is functional and stable, but the impression of it isn't because of a few small issues that just seem to bother many people)
so by attacking these remaining issues, valve is making a significant contribution.
i think it is also important that valve is able to apply patches before they make it into wine, because that means these patches see way more testing than the wine project probably would be capable of on their own. which is another reason that makes vales work significant.
I used wine for many years. "Semi-usable half-working project" was entirely my experience; nearly everything I tried to run had at least one weird bug.
The proton work is open source (and readily installable without using the storefront), so you can actually just look and see that they did, in fact, fix many little bugs that break games - perhaps only many hundreds, rather than thousands.
Have you actually used the commercial version? It's relatively stable and QAed and you can get support from the Wine developers, but it lags the open source version by months. You're not getting the latest compatibility fixes or performance improvements with it.
nevertheless the commercial version must be of use to someone by addressing pain points that other users don't have. and i wager that it is exactly those small issues that don't bother others but that matter for people willing to pay for it.
Theorycrafting here, but wine and proton will make it pretty easy to decouple Steam platform DRM.
It should be noted that it's perfectly possible to release your game on steam in a way where the steam client doesn't even need to be running in order to launch the game. The choice to tie Steam's service into the ability to run the software you purchase /seems/ to be a decision made entirely by the people publishing their games.
If that's the case, you should really be more concerned about that behavior rather than Steam's DRM existing. Don't buy games whose behaviors you disagree with!
Valve is a contributor, so that’s not an entirely true statement. And I was replying to your original statement that “Proton is just wine”, which again, is not true.
Basically means: “in the most essential respects; fundamentally.” So in this case, no, omitting the word basically makes no meaningful change to the meaning of your sentence.
Proton is not just WINE. It is a bundle of many open source technologies including WINE. Proton was a major step forward in the consolidation and simplification of running Windows games on Linux. It also included a ton of upstream contributions to all the bundled technology by full time paid Valve employees.
It's interesting to see Apple basically imitating this with their porting toolkit. The net result is game developers being presented with two growing ecosystems for the same game simply by ensuring they stay compatible with both. With their VR stuff coming out soon, there could be a big push to get some games going there.
Either way, if you are a game developer, ensuring the games work fine via proton and Apple's porting kit should be a no-brainer. Basically, it should just work mostly without too much effort. All you need to do is a bit of Q&A and maybe avoiding to use some stuff that is problematic or coming up with some workarounds for those things. Neither ecosystem is very big. But at the same time, growing your market by a few percent is always nice. It's big enough that not supporting that is becoming an odd choice to make.
I've been using Steam on my Manjaro laptop for some casual gaming. The setup was pretty easy and I'm able to run most of my steam library. I'm not much of a gamer but I've bought some things over the years. And most of those things stopped working on macs. My guess is that Valve is starting to see a lot of Linux users with steam accounts that don't own a Steam Deck. It wouldn't surprise me if that's actually most of their Linux users.
As for OSS, Wine is basically very successful thanks to efforts like this. Most successful OSS projects need active users and, like it or not, the private sector tends to be by far the largest stakeholder in these projects. Wine as a hobby project was basically a bit of a niche thing. They got a lot of amazing stuff done of course. But it was kind of a bit of a pain to set it up and use it and progress was slow. Also support for a lot of games was a bit lacking and very dependent on the community chasing that. Steam makes this super easy and they made huge progress with getting a lot of games working. More importantly, they are big enough that game developers themselves now care about compatibility. And that's of course more commercial users.
Since historically Linux usage hovered around 1%, I'm guessing that the Steam Deck by itself didn't drive any additional users to Desktop Linux (or at least not in huge amounts), though the 1% by itself is probably driven by Valve's efforts to improve Linux support.
It's great that Valve is willing to pay them for it. It's a bit sad that such capital investment from a commercial party is necessary, but I can live with that.
As someone who has just switched to Linux gaming, I've got to say it's working great. Maybe it's slightly less stable, but not by much, and performance is excellent.
It's a bit sad that such capital investment from a commercial party is necessary
by now the linux ecosystem has received to much commercial investment to separate out what is community effort and what is not, but i believe that most of the polish that went into linux desktop applications and interfaces have some commercial investment in them.
the problem is that for most volunteers 90% of usability is good enough. if it works for me, my work is done. on the other hand the imperfect is almost necessary to attract contributors. a perfectly working application is more likely to attract users but less contributors. and as soon as contributors work on something it becomes imperfect again.
this is not to say that contributors mess things up, on the contrary, but most do just enough work to make it work for them, leaving the work to polish it up for other users to someone else. and i think that is perfectly fine. contributors should not be expected to do work that is of no benefit for themselves. the benefit of a polished application is almost always for non-contributing end users, which in turn is almost always a commercial interest.
That's absolutely true. Valve has added significant value and I love them for it. And the community is still doing great work tuning configurations for each game.
One particularly great thing about Valve's support is that it benefits all games, and not just those on Steam. It's absolutely a great example of how open source helps everybody.
> It's a bit sad that such capital investment from a commercial party is necessary
I think it's great that someone invests. That investments are necessary is no sadder than that salaries are necessary for your work. It's just a normal part of work/life where the alternative would be to do it for free, out of passion. But you also have to make a living.
> That investments are necessary is no sadder than that salaries are necessary for your work.
Well, that's also sad.
I just wanted to say it would have been nice if the community would have been able to get this working more easily. But clearly it's too much work to do it without some dedicated fulltimers.
fully agree! I'm biased because I also work for pay on open source products but I think it's a great "rising tide lifts all boats" model of software development.
Well, yes. But what I mean is that it would have been nice if hobbyists were able to accomplish this without needing the help from a commercial entity.
I'm a bit at a loss why some people here prefer commercialised open source over community-driven open source. I mean, I'll take it, and Valve did an amazing job, but there have been plenty of attempts to make this work before Valve stepped in, and it just didn't work that well back then, and it would have been nice if we didn't have to rely on Valve for this.
This sounds the same as you wanting other people to do things for free. I don't know about nice, but I certainly wouldn't lament people being paid to do something.
You're missing my point. The issue isn't money, it's dependency.
Using Steam and the whole Valve-supported infrastructure still doesn't cost me anything. But what if Valve decides the Steam Deck isn't commercially viable for them?
Then we'll be a lot further ahead than if Valve had never paid for this work to be done. I don't know what better alternative you're after. Isn't this open source work? There's no ongoing dependency. If Valve shut up shop tomorrow we're in a better state than if they'd never funded development, aren't we?
it was the opposite for me, I was tempted into getting the steam deck because it seemed like a fun device and an exciting new frontier for linux, and it's gotten me into gaming in a way I haven't been since college.
When I got my SteamDeck, I thought I was going to do a lot more tinkering than I did gaming. I planned on getting NixOS working on it. I ended up just playing games and having fun just using the stock install.
I'm tempted to get one, but it's going to be sitting on a shelf, along with my Oculus Quest. Gaming is a thing that sounds nice in principle, but I rarely can get into it in practice.
i was in the same boat - i wanted to enjoy games again, especially indie games, but i was mostly just buying them during steam sales and then never playing them. i bought the steam deck in order to see if it would be a more fun gaming experience than my laptop, and if not at least i'd have a fun linux device to tinker with. but it absolutely did get me back into playing (maybe an hour or so a day) and i've been enjoying it a lot.
Hmm, that's very interesting. I'm exactly the same as you, I really like indie games but it's always "meh, I'd rather do something else". Maybe I'll borrow a friend's Deck for a weekend to try it, thanks!
That's how reality works. In order to do something, resources must be invested. In order for resources to be invested, people must perceive value in the thing they are investing in.
In order to do something big, many people must invest many resources, and they would only do so if they all see great value in the thing.
In order to have resources to invest, all of the people must have excess resources that they have generated from previous endeavors.
Remember, capitalism is merely the most efficient system we have for assigning limited resources across society.
the interesting thing for me is that my assumption was that linux gaming would not pick up until the desktop experience of installing and using games would improve, but i somehow missed that creating a separate "game desktop" would do the trick. i didn't consider before that it absolutely makes sense to keep games in their own environment which does make the task a bit easier.
but this also validates another assumption of mine, that it would take funding probably driven by commercial interest (and here i was thinking of companies like redhat) to fix this.
> The assumption was that Linux would struggle to make a dent in the desktop market until it managed to make a tempting proposition for gamers.
I don't think that assumption has been validated, and I don't see that from this article. The premise of this article isn't that the steam deck is taking market share, it's that it's increasing compatibility of games on linux. More to the point, the steamdeck hasn't made a dent in the desktop market, see [0] it's a fraction of a percentage of _gamers_ never mind any other use cases.
Don't read this as me saying this isn't progress, but we're still a far cry (pun intended) from a dent.
Linux is now more popular than OSX according to those statistics. That's a decent milestone, and it's only going to grow as enshittification forces further downgrades in user experience, freedom and privacy in commercial OSes.
> Linux is now more popular than OSX according to those statistics.
Linux is more popular than OSX _on steam_ according to those statistics.
> it's only going to grow as enshittification forces further downgrades in user experience, freedom and privacy in commercial OSes.
I think you're wrong here. Take a look at the wayback machine [0] for a history of this data. There was absolutely 0 growth in linux use over the past decade until last year. The thing that changed wasn't enshittifaction, it was a piece of hardware that provided a good user experience. It's nothing to do with windows/mac getting worse or less privacy focused, it's valve providing a smooth usable product that _happens_ to run linux. I'm curious if Proton's success causes a decrease in windows users and an increase in other distros, but right now that's not what we're seeing.
Funnily enough Amazon has its own internal repo, including NPM. And it can be a pain in the ass to add anything to it, especially npm packages. So sometimes you would have to spend 5 minutes, or sometimes an hour, to import a single existing public NPM package into the internal repo.
Some people meet this with a healthy level of scepticism, which is great. However I used to work at Amazon, working on the performance evaluation and HR tools used within the company. It was a couple of years back, but I am fairly certain that the same tools are still used, given that all of them were developed from scratch. At the time it was in line with the company's PR of removing its toxic work culture.
It's worth mentioning that it wasn't uncommon for people to move around teams, and to be honest HR is not the most exciting field for software development anyways. So, as expected, the HR dev teams had people move around quite a bit. Nothing toxic so far.
One of the projects I worked on was what used to be called the dev list or personal improvement plan (pip) now renamed to Pivot. Most likely the exact same same tool. Management wanted to update the processes in order to automate as much as possible and reduce the risk of managers putting someone in pip, just because they didn't like them. However the process was set up in such a way that a manager can progress an employee through a pip for waaaay too long, until a failsafe, or a second pair of eyes even takes a look at it. I, personally, voiced my concerns about it, but it was shrugged off as "it shouldn't happen", "managers wouldn't do that" and "it's fine" by the project stakeholders.
The project starts, development is going a usual and a couple of years go by. I moved to another project within the HR space. Most of the team developing the tool has also moved on to greener pastures. Apart from that one guy, who has been there since its inception. He went from being a backend engineer, learning React and painstakingly working on a messy frontend codebase, eventually leaving him the only person competent enough to make changes to it. Eventually he was fed up and wanted to move to a different team. Lo and behold - his manager, the manager of the team building the pip tool, put him in pip to prevent him from moving. Haven't seen someone decide and actually leave a company as quickly as he did. So if the manager of the pip company can use it to blackmail people not to leave, I can't even imagine what it's like for the rest of the company.
Some people meet this with a healthy level of scepticism, which is great.
However I used to work at Amazon, working on the performance evaluation and HR tools used within the company.
It was a couple of years back, but I am fairly certain that the same tools are still used, given that all of them were developed from scratch.
At the time it was in line with the company's PR of removing its toxic work culture.
It's worth mentioning that it wasn't uncommon for people to move around teams, and to be honest HR is not the most exciting field for software development anyways.
So, as expected, the HR dev teams had people move around quite a bit.
Nothing toxic so far.
One of the projects I worked on was what used to be called the dev list or personal improvement plan (pip) now renamed to Pivot. Most likely the exact same same tool.
Management wanted to update the processes in order to automate as much as possible and reduce the risk of managers putting someone in pip, just because they didn't like them.
However the process was set up in such a way that a manager can progress an employee through a pip for waaaay too long, until a failsafe, or a second pair of eyes even takes a look at it.
I, personally, voiced my concerns about it, but it was shrugged off as "it shouldn't happen", "managers wouldn't do that" and "it's fine" by the project stakeholders.
The project starts, development is going a usual and a couple of years go by.
I moved to another project within the HR space.
Most of the team developing the tool has also moved on to greener pastures.
Apart from that one guy, who has been there since its inception.
He went from being a backend engineer, learning React and painstakingly working on a messy frontend codebase, eventually leaving him the only person competent enough to make changes to it.
Eventually he was fed up and wanted to move to a different team. Lo and behold - his manager, the manager of the team building the pip tool, put him in pip to prevent him from moving.
Haven't seen someone decide and actually leave a company as quickly as he did.
So if the manager of the pip company can use it to blackmail people not to leave, I can't even imagine what it's like for the rest of the company.
That was a very readable comment. I'm reminded of the times I've posted here about "If it's 3 paragraphs or longer, my coworkers won't read it" only to get responses like "Must be poor writing on your part!"
It looks totally fine on a monitor, but because of the narrow width on cell phone displays, a paragraph can extend beyond the display's height, and it psychologically has an impact on people.
I really didn't think the "linkedin-style spacing" was necessary. The OP was not exactly short, but had a good enough sense of spacing and used paragraph breaks appropriately.
Had a similar experience where I tried to switch to another team. But wasn't able to move because I missed expectations the prior year or something along those lines. Was never put on pip, but I left 2 months later. Team had horrible 50%+ attrition that year.
“ eventually leaving him the only person competent enough to make changes to it”
erm, this makes it sound like he was a not a very good engineer. Your code should always be written so that if you get hit by a bus one day, the rest of your team could pick right up where you left off
Unfortunately this is a quite common scenario in big enterprises, such as Amazon, Google and the lot. Main reason is the promotion process.
Usually you need to gather evidence that you've contributed significantly to a project. And the easiest way to do that is to work on new projects. Maintaining an existing codebase is usually a thankless job, which is also hard to get you promoted.
And once the new project is released it eventually gets abandoned and people move to the next one, which would help them get promoted. Think of all the Google projects that have been discontinued, which were also a product of similar processes.
For both there are shortcuts already available for a "command" input. For example in IntelliJ it's called "Actions" - you can use it to look up basically any command/functionality from there.
I've been using Idea essentially without a mouse for a few years now. It takes a little bit of time to get used to all the shortcuts, but it definitely pays of in the long run.
I'll try to answer this from a JS-specific perspective. As someone previously mentioned - you do get hash checks if you're using `npm ci` in your CI/CD setup. You get the resolution path as well. Which is all you need to reproducibly resolve dependencies, *if* you have set up npm correctly in your pipeline. It would be unlikely to be exposed to this particular attack, at least not automatically in your deployment pipelines.
However this is still very, very dangerous, because of day-to-day engineering, really. Any engineer doing a simple `npm install` can inadvertently bring in and execute malicious code from their machine. From there on out it would be somewhat trivial to gain further access to the same network the code war run from.
Also don't forget projects like Cloud9. It is literally a cloud-based IDE similar to what the author was talking about.
I do agree with someone else's comment that this is lazy writing - even a little bit of research/google-fu would immediately point you to similar projects.
Early 2019 I went for an interview with Uber. Mind you it wasn't in Silicon Valley, but at a smaller office in Europe. Anyways, the interview process is very similar to other big tech companies - 5 interviews, 2 on coding, 2 on systems design and a manager one. I've done and I'm still doing phone screens and interviews for my current company, but the level of unprofessionalism in Uber still stays with me. Most of the interviews were okay, but I remember the last systems design one, where the interviewer walked in with a glass of Bailey's and was acting like he was owning the place. That really put me off. Don't get me wrong, I like a drink as much as the next guy, but there is a time and a place for that. Definitely not during an interview. When it came to offering me a job, they did send me a RSU package as well, with the promise that the stock was massively undervalued and will skyrocket once the IPO is out. Guess what - just as everyone expected the stock tanked.
I'm so glad I didn't take the job. It just showed a culture of not-giving-a-fuck, laziness and false promises. And that's not even in the headquarters. I'm definitely not surprised about the different levels of misconduct going on there.
I did report the Bailey's guy when they asked me for feedback, but I still regret not walking out as soon as the guy walked in.
My point is - if that's how they handle interviews, I wouldn't even wanna know what the overall culture is and I'm glad I stayed away from it.
I have a funny piece of trivia for you. The name of the project struck me as a little weird. And given how labour intensive this would be it is kind of fitting tho. Oh - inat means spite/stubborn in Serbian.
I can't stress enough how much of a bad idea this is. I was stunned when a few days ago I was looking up something on Google Maps and started seeing advertised locations/suggestions.
Even though I love the product and have been a fan of Google products for the longest time, their current strategy of monetizing everything they can is very off putting. The direction Chrome is taking is also concerning.
Don't know what really is going on at Google at the higher levels, but from an outsider's perspective is seems like they are aggressively trying to grow even more. Maybe to raise stock price? But to invest in what? Maybe to compete with Apple and Amazon? I can't be the only one who thinks it all seems odd - going from "don't be evil" to shutting down a massive number of projects with a lot of potential (e.g. Inbox, Fiber)...
Don't mean to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but looking at the bigger picture, it looks like Google's strategy is going through some changes and I'm not convinced this would play out well for them in the end.
Well said. Thanks Google for cluttering my life with more unwanted spam.
I used to think of the Google brand very highly. Lately my subconscious associates it with the expectation of a sub-par user experience and some slightly creepy tendencies.
Couldnt agree more. In starting my quest to deGooglify my life, i switched to a new LG phone off my pixel 2 and i have to say, its worse. Am I going to switch back? Sure wont. Google has lost my business.
On an article related note, i wonder if/when this will affect waze
deGooglifying by moving from a Google Google phone to an LG Google phone.
Of course, the only viable alternative at this point is Apple. That's the choice I made and I feel they've earned higher consumer trust... for the moment.
I really think that, with smartphone technological improvements flattening out and the oligopoly starting to squeeze their customer base, there's never been a better time for open smartphone projects to get a foothold.
I hate what Google has become but some iOS design decisions like tying it to iTunes make me want to gouge my eyes out. The time is ripe for another phone OS.
I really can't stop using their search engine without making my life worse and yes I've tried DDG and bing etc.
Agreed. And this is not a good time for Google to spoil their brand since Apple services have been improving. We met up with friends in Chicago yesterday and while walking around using both Siri and Google on two iPhones, we were comparing results and ‘ready at hand’ utility. Google is better but I like Apple;s trajectory of improvement.
Why should they offer a free maps service? They are a business with shareholder responsibilities, not a charity, and maps must cost them a ton of money to operate.
You are correct. The reverse is true too, why should contribute data to their maps service for free?
I've done lot of work to add and correct roads, update business info and addresses in my area. If they want to fill the map with ads they have that right - but when they drive me (and people like me) away, their product will suffer.
I’d strongly recommended putting future efforts into Open Streetmap instead - they have a fantastic set of data and tools and are usually (in my experience) more accurate and updated more quickly than Google.
I wish more people would do this, but sometimes it's a tough sell. I once tried to encourage a bunch of people who were banging their heads bloody trying to contribute to Facebook's places database to switch to editing OpenStreetMap instead. Most didn't want to switch -- they were convinced that their miserable experience improving Facebook was more impactful because it was a more popular product that they knew they used.
I with OSM would come out with a consumer-focused map product. I think that would go a long way towards attracting more contributors, since most people get started to scratch an itch in a product they use.
The StreetComplete app makes it fun and easy to contribute to OSM when walking around, by asking you simple questions about your immediate surroundings (how many stories does this building have, is this street one-way at this location, etc.) I highly recommend it.
Open Streetmap doesn’t build laser scanning drones, or fleets of connected 360 camera vehicles, or the tech and infrastructure to do the mapping. SOMEONE has to build all of that. It can’t be free. If it’s govt funded, then there WILL be corruption, scams, and it’ll be run as well as the DMV.
Because the private sector is free of corruption and scams?
The UK ordnance survey[1] is government run and is generally fantastic. They cover every inch of the UK in excruciating detail, provide centimeter precise GPS coordinates for everything and publish invaluable, cheap maps of it all. Why do you assume that the seemingly inept and corrupt US standard is the baseline that everything else will be?
Their maps were probably world-leading in the 90's.
Now though, I feel like the tech giants have overtaken them.
Where is the street view or 3d models? Where are the opening times of every shop? Where is the traffic congestion info? Where is the ability to look up a house number and find where on the street it is?
These are all things I regularly want to know and are location based, so really ought to be part of a mapping service.
That will probably never get done in a OSS manner at the scale of google, and even if it was serving it would probably be enormously expensive.
> 3d models
A lot of 3d models are in OSM, although not as detailed as in proprietary solutions.
> opening times of every shop
This is not something I want in the same database as the location data. The hope is that more sites/services use discovarable technologies lite microdata to make sure that it can be added to the map via separate databases.
> traffic congestion info
Again, real-time info is not really something I want in the same db as the actual street. traffic congestion info is a very different service than location or mapping info.
> look up a house number
This is part of the OSM offering, look into nominatim
Many Americans have a baseless distrust of government. Our schools teach us from a very young age that "government bad, founding fathers came here from Britain to escape the evil government".
Osm is donation funded. For all your scepticism you could have found that in seconds. People contribute for fun, not because they boss told them to fly this later drone around so their expensive software can process it. That saves a lot of cost. The hardware is nearly free, look at Wikipedia: they beg for your money every few months but of the millions collected, a fraction actually goes to the hosting they imply it's for.
Osm also takes data from governments and other organisations that publish it, but only if it's already available under a compatible free license. Not sure where you see that tie in with corruption (which additionally is much more frequent in the private sector but maybe that depends on your country, but since there are no big bucks flowing in and all financial records are public and are plausible for what they do (I looked through it), the point is moot anyway).
I don't know about laser-scanning drones but for street-level imagery Mapillary and OpenStreetCam do the job. That is, if they have users around the area you're interested in.
The government is mostly likely to be inefficient if it starts a company by committee and competition is prohibited. If it's just a financial backer for an independent entity, with a lot of strings attached to its support, I don't see why that would be any less efficient than any other business. Perhaps we just need to reexamine how the government gets things done...
I get the use of an amazing map service for which I pay them with my data. I even contribute fixes, reviews, and photos. I'm pretty happy with that price. I don't give them anything for free. They pay me in service.
I actually want the ads too although I want them 100x better than they are and I'm sure Google like Amazon will fail for a while at curating the fake stuff. In an ideal world they'd have inventory and menus of every store so I could search for "pizza with avocados open now" or "1/4inch wrench" and it could tell me exactly where I can get them right now.
>. "pizza with avocados open now" or "1/4inch wrench" and it could tell me exactly where I can get them right now.
Answering queries like that has so much revenue potential. Possibly even more than the rest of Google put together. You bet they're trying to get there and have been for years. The reality is it's super hard to collect that data.
They've tried getting shops to upload info about what they sell (the Google Shopping manifest files). They've tried putting Bluetooth trackers in every store (they mailed them out to all big businesses in 2014 and said 'stick one of these in every department of your shop') to track who goes there to know what store might have what products. They've tried putting their own staff in the stores (Google Shopping Express, and the Chromebox staff in electronics stores).
Regardless of what the sibling comment says, the editing UX is really good now. Their editor has a beautiful walkthrough and easy-to-use tools, at least on desktop: https://www.openstreetmap.org/edit
True, I think one of the things Google Maps does very cleverly is making it really easy for users to suggest corrections, often just a single tap away. That said, OSMand has been making great strides usability-wise, and though it's still pretty lacking, hopefully it'll get there some day too.
I'll be honest, I actually prefer OSMand to some other navigation apps. It may be that I'm used to it, but I find it works really well. I think my only complaint is that they use an arrow to show where they think you should go and a kind of weird, hard to see shading to show where the phone is pointing. It confuses me each time until I remember how it works.
Almost all free and open-source alternative have terrible UIs and crappy UX. And some have shitty content too.
However, that content is done by volunteers just like you, and if you refuse to contribute because something puts you off, then the project dies. Imagine people with the same mindset as you: Oh, I don't bother contributing my design skills because the content sucks. And you don't contribute because design sucks. In the end, no one contributes and the project, as a whole, suffers.
But if the project suffers, you and everyone else, lose to corporate offerings like Google. And that is fine, if you like that. But don't expect them to respect you. I hate to say this, but change has to come from within, not from laws, market forces or anything else.
So, if you want LIBRE maps, and you really care about that, just go on and do it. Gather people, make noise and work hard. There's thousands of highly successful projects to get inspired by.
OpenStreetMap's leadership isn't bold enough to ever become the leading map provider. I don't want to contribute (for free) unless I think one day my work will impact millions of people.
In what way aren't they bold enough? Their license is too restrictive for many commercial uses, driving big businesses (apple, Google, Microsoft) and their users away.
They don't use crowdsourced data. You're never going to be able to build real-time traffic maps by manual means.. They need to make a platform to anonymously share user data so other volunteers can write automated code to turn it into real-time map features.
Likewise, they might not have the resources for street view, but I bet a few million people submitting their photo library would get a photograph of a substantial number of buildings... Then it's just about code to sort, classify, tag, and arrange the images to be useful.
Apple and Microsoft use OSM data. So do Facebook and Garmin and countless others.
OSM already impacts the lives of millions of people. Indeed, it genuinely saves lives through its humanitarian work, and has been doing so since the Haiti earthquake.
What you appear to be saying is that it doesn’t provide motorist-centric features like “real-time traffic maps”. As someone who thinks the world would be a whole bunch better if there were fewer cars, I’m good with that.
OP is not saying they cannot monetise their product as they see fit (it's their product). No one is saying that.
But when you have been offering something for free for years, people get used to that being the way of things, users are not going to respond well to the increase in advertisement.
Had Google done this from the beginning, people would have been more accepting of it. Generally speaking, if you change a service for the worse, people are generally going to view it less favourably than had it started out how it will now become.
> There aren't a lot of good alternatives to Maps though.
For much of the world, OpenStreetMap data is considerably more complete than Google Maps. It is true that there is no website based on OSM that is as convenient as maps.google.com, but more and more people are using maps on mobile, where they are relying on apps and not a website, and OSM-based solutions like Maps.Me are good substitutes for Google’s ecosystem.
> "For much of the world, OpenStreetMap data is considerably more complete than Google Maps."
This is particularly true for many not-so-obscure niches, like hiking trails in and around major US cities. Once you stray from roads and business locations, Google Maps gets shockingly sparse.
Google Maps is bare bones, while OpenStreetMap has tons of detail, even including locations for drinking water and park benches! Drinking water in particular is a great feature. You can't see that drinking fountain on Google Maps from either the satellite imagery or the street view imagery, but I can personally attest to it being there, right where OSM says it is.
Bus lines in Germany too, to take perhaps an unexpected area.
The official and unofficial transport apps don't tell you the bus will be at platform 16 on a completely different street. Made me miss the bus more than once, the second time I planned time for it but it took me 20 minutes to find the stop. I assumed it was one of the first fourteen stop positions and I just overlooked it, went around again (inside, on the street, other side of the street...), still didn't find it, until I checked OpenStreetMap which just shows it on a map and gives the exact stop position instead of only the stop name.
The latest version of OsmAnd can even do public transport routing. It won't give you timetables that are subject to too frequent changes, but it's still impressive.
Depends what you use it for. For driving directions, there are plenty of alternatives. An excellent one is a standalone GPS device like a Garmin nüvi or a TomTom, which works entirely offline (except traffic reports, which are received over FM radio or Bluetooth). The only time I actually use Google Maps is when I'm at my PC, and Bing maps works just as well.
I think if you tried using gmaps for navigation you’d find it to be a far superior to those devices. Does your TomTom tell you “turn into the driveway after the Vitamin Shop”? Because gmaps does.
I have used google Maps for navigation. It's not all that much better than my Garmin, at least not in my area. Even in downtown Manhattan the Garmin worked flawlessly.
And Garmin units have had natural directions like that for four or five years. But I find it more of a hindrance than anything. I would rather hear "Turn right onto Wellington St" than "Turn right at the Starbucks", especially because the Starbucks is not always obvious.
But more importantly, I prefer a dedicated device because it's way more convenient. It's always there, it doesn't kill my battery, it doesn't rack up roaming fees when I cross the border[0], it has a large screen that's easy to see[1], it has super useful features like "Up ahead" that shows where the next rest stop, service centre, etc. is, and it leaves my phone free for audiobook duties.
My Garmin has been nearly 100% reliable because it never moves and automatically comes on with the ignition. Google Maps is at best 20% reliable because it's not there when I need it.
[0] Yes, google Maps can download maps to work offline, but they constantly expire, leaving me high and dry when I actually need them, and I don't want to download half the continental US just for a road trip. Oh, and POI search is gimped when offline.
[1] My phone does not have a large screen, and Google Maps' map is incredibly difficult to decipher when driving because of super thin low-contrast lines, tiny labels, and a non-zoomable display (when in driving mode).
I too have a garmin based navigation radio and I won't be ver trade it over Gmaps, as you said it's always there just touch the icon and it's up and running, i can speak directions just like in the phone it will lower the music or phone volume to tell directions, i can sync search adresses from my phone or can search on it if i want to, it's faster.
Is yours built into the dash? How much of a pain is it to update the maps? Mine stays in the suction cup mount on the windshield, but when I update it once a year or so, I can easily bring it into the house and plug it into my computer. It's not linked to my radio at all, so I don't get niceties like lowering the volume, but I don't mind.
I just use a software in the desktop that will tell me if there's any available update, if so i can put it on an SD card and just pop it in the car and that's it, I believe i can do it directly o the unit through wifi but never tried.
> I have used google Maps for navigation. It's not all that much better than my Garmin, at least not in my area. Even in downtown Manhattan the Garmin worked flawlessly.
If flawlessly defined sending one to the closed street and putting one into a two hour long traffic jam because it has no real time data feed, then sure maybe it is flawless. But this is 2019 and not 2009.
But it did not do that to me. And this was in 2016, not 2019.
Furthermore, it does have a data feed for traffic, through FM radio (using the power cable as an antenna) and/or a Bluetooth connection to a phone. It's not as good as google Maps' traffic updates and it's only for major roads, but it works pretty well.
Honestly, I don't think I'd call that ability "far superior". If it came without cost, it would have some value, but it's not a game-changer or anything.
It was a game changer for me. I would have completely missed the driveway if not for it telling me to look past the Vitamin Shop. Would have taken me five minutes to circle back around again. That seems like a big deal to me.
I find this comment super interesting, I assume alerting you to the vitamin shop is an ad, but its also a feature that differentiates gmaps from other mapping services. It also feels like a less creepy form of advertising as it is obvious why they are letting you know about the vitamin shop, as it is location dependent and directly relevant to your directions.
Though I'd agree with the sibling who questions how much of a game changer it is, I can't help but notice how fantastic an example this is of the value in having a diverse team developing a product.
I think that period was part of their investment and also helped them to improve the product. And like any other investment, they need to make money as well. I can imagine Maps is an expensive product to operate. I also hate ads and I hope they find a different way to make it reasonably profitable.
It's a surprisingly sizeable mistake to think this way. Google was loved because they gave things that were better than the era state of the art. Hotmail users moved away to gmail because it was dead obvious. Maps used to cost a lot and were clumsy.. now you can fly over them in a browser.
Google's business was to answer query. The rest was philanthropy. If they start to operate like any other crap stock they'll go the way of the loo.
Operating Maps gives Google a ton of information about where people go, where they work, live, what businesses they patronize, etc. Data they can turn around and use for advertising purposes. It's not like they've been running Maps out of the goodness of their hearts.
I don't think the issue is monetization. I think the issue is the method of monetization. Doing something like offering paid enhancements, or even an option to pay in exchange for being omitted from the ad network, would be more acceptable.
It's hard to tell for certain from that site, but it looks like that doesn't do what I want. What I want is to stop the data collection that is used for advertising. Does Contributer do that?
Also, this looks like it's about web sites that carry Google ads (and only those sites that have decided to participate -- none of which look to be sites I use anyway), not Google's own services.
Users are unlikely to use Google for maps and say, Bing for their searches. Maps drives traffic to search. Conversely, making maps overly commercial will drive traffic away from search.
>Users are unlikely to use Google for maps and say, Bing for their searches.
I don't know, I see very little tying the two together. I currently use DDG exclusively for search except for localized searching and maps, for which I use Google. There isn't really much friction to switch between the two. Especially since most of my map usage is on mobile, where it is a separate app.
I started using Bing maps for its own sake, after Google redesigned their maps site a few years back and made it far less useful; I've never bothered to use Bing search. The two functions have not been related in my experience.
There are tons of viable competitors to google maps, even on Android, last time I checked.
They all have different monetization strategies, and all provide good enough turn by turn directions. I regularly use Here WeGo for its offline support. Sygic is probably still fine.
I think Sygic moved to a freemium model, and I get the impression Here is subsidized by luxury car manufacturers.
Yelp crushes google maps on search.
I really don’t understand why google maps is so popular. Like search, maps is a capital intensive, commodity product with near-zero switching cost. I guess the same can be said of Coke and Pepsi, and they’re chugging along just fine. It’s a good thing I don’t work in brand management!
Not even in the same ball park. Yelp's search for example does not understand that there's a RIVER between Brooklyn and Manhattan. So when I'm in Greenpoint it says there's something right there, in Manhattan when I want something local.
I think when a lot of people made their "maps provider" decision, there weren't a lot of these other options available. Many people use Google Maps because it was the best maps option at the time they were first figuring out their early smartphone apps.
And for newer people, bundling is hugely impactful. Doing nothing is almost always the most popular choice
Interestingly enough, Google like an increasing number of companies is a "public" company. Brin and Page own the majority of the voting power meaning Google, is for all intents and purposes, their company. The same is true of Facebook and Zuckerberg which makes all the calls to try to replace him rather bemusing. Literally every person who owns Facebook stock could vote to replace him and it'd be irrelevant since he has the majority of voting power.
The point of this is that the direction Google has been taking lately has been very much the arbitrary choice and direction chosen by Larry and Sergey, and consequently highly reflective of their own personal ideologies and worldviews.
What changed over the last 10 years, and why wasn’t it monetized earlier? Maybe because then they wanted to make a useful service and get some data for their search ads, and now they just want more money.
Google Maps was a revolutionary product that popularized the category, they had no competition when it was released, at least now there's Apple Maps, Open Street Map, Bing Maps, Tencent Maps.
I was developing with ESRI ArcGIS at the time, ESRI was a multi-billion dollar GEO company who had no product that even came close to the instant utility Google Maps launched with.
The only other product that had a similar "Wow" factor around the same time was Keyhole which we were using before Google acquired them and used it to launch "Google Earth".
If anything Google Maps spawned competition in the last decade, the existing competitors like ESRI are still developing their GEO products for Internal/Enterprise use, but now there are a number of competing consumer mapping services that provide the same utility and functionality of Google Maps from large technology companies that didn't have GEO as part of their competency like: Apple Maps, Bing Maps and Tencent Maps.
I just finished reading "Never Lost Again: The Google Mapping Revolution That Sparked New Industries and Augmented Our Reality" (https://amzn.com/0062673041) about the evolution of Google Earth, Maps, and Street View. Written by one of the founders of Keyhole (the company that built what became Google Earth), the book is mostly about the founding of Keyhole and its mapping technology, but it has some insider info about the political maneuverings between Google's Search and Geo teams over owning the map ads because everyone knew it would be a big deal. The book is pretty interesting, but light on the technical details.
There were multiple competing products when Google Maps was released, so they had competition. Google's product was simply better at than most alternatives at the time.
There was no real-time Consumer Maps App that came close to competing with Google Maps UX. Now there are multiple Consumer Mapping Services that replicate the instant utility of Google Maps, but it was revolutionary with no equal at the time.
As I'm being down voted without any discussion I'll remove why none of the existing competition did or could've done what Google Maps did and keep the insights I had at the time as a GEO developer to myself. Fly-by downvoters can continue believing the revisionist history they wish to.
Feel free to believe Google Maps had competition (they didn't), nothing else at the time provided the same instant utility of Google Maps which basically ushered in the new category of "real-time search-based Consumer Maps" of which there are plenty now.
Anything that existed previously would've needed a rewrite to achieve the same instant utility of Google Maps. Nothing without it could've become mainstream. The competition like ESRI still doesn't have it, but they're still focused on Internal/Enterprise Usage, they let you build GEO Maps but they don't let you build consumer maps that compete with Google Maps.
You're agreeing with me here by admitting that there was existing competition. The rest of your remarks are about how much better Google's offering was to the competition, which is a point I've already agreed with.
That's like saying a DB search is existing competition for a Google Search, it isn't.
There were existing GEO companies that provided Mapping Services (I was developing GEO Apps with one of them at the time), but there was nothing like the consumer focused Google's Maps preceding it, with its worldwide pre-rendered imagery at multiple zoom-levels coupled with a global search that displayed annotated Markup results delivered over an Ajax Web interface that allowed seamless panning/zooming of the Earth scaled to millions of users.
It wasn't a fluke that Google Maps gained instant popularity with mainstream Internet users over everything else, there was nothing else like it.
> That's like saying a DB search is existing competition for a Google Search
If by "DB search" you mean the old-school engines like Lycos, etc., then yes, it is like saying that. And yes, I think those did count as existing competition for Google search.
I suspect that we mean different things by "competition" here...
As an avid user of mapquest back in the day, the user experience that google provided (tiled maps that could be panned/zoomed seamlessly) was absolutely revolutionary and the clincher for me.
Mapquest back then had the clunky “click the big arrow” to move the map and reload the page navigation...
The instant utility was essential to its massive popularity, it basically ushered in the new era for real-time Consumer mapping. Everything preceding it was clunky, slow and "turn based". I can't recall what the state of MapQuest was at the time, but it's unlikely it had the real-time UX or utility of Google Maps.
Was a real eye-opener of "so that's how you make Maps fast" at the time, just pre-render the entire world at multiple static zoom levels. Which wasn't an option (disk cost) for anyone developing their own in-house mapping Services at the time. For my next GEO project I did the next best thing and used their Google Maps API to change it to make map tile requests to our ArcGIS App which dynamically cached map tiles on the fly, so whilst it didn't pre-render all tiles, it provided a nice "Google Maps"-like UX for popular areas of our region.
Multimap and Streetmap in the UK both had prerendered tiles at multiple zoom levels years before Google. I'd developed a smooth "slippy map" at my then employer (waterscape.com) before Google Maps was released, using Flash and the Ming authoring interface, but IIRC Google released before we did.
It was never free. Every time you use it, you offer up your current location and/or place(s) you’re interested in visiting, all of which is very valuable for targeted advertising.
If you go down that road, why offer our content for free to google to index? Maps and other google services help the web grow, which helps them sell more ads. It 's a synergy until it is no longer one. I suppose they will not be dumb enough to monetize recaptcha next.
The shouldn't. They should be forced to close, and Maps and Search should be provided by a non-profit, internationally controlled (UN etc), organization, not a for-profit company.
That's my opinion of what would be best. Some services (like "indexing the world's knowledge") are too important to be left to private interests and be monetized via ads...
Forced to close? Why? That's a terrible authoritarian idea.
The only solution is more competition, not less. Trying to limit who can do what has only ever led to worse outcomes. There's nothing stopping a non-profit group from creating maps today if they wanted to.
Authoritarianism is not a solution, but neither is the magic of the free market when the dynamic is increasingly consolidated wealth looking for ever faster returns due to the technology cycle.
The idea that a non-profit could compete in the current economic and cultural climate is laughable. Some social change is required, and government for all its flaws is the logical place for such change to actually gain some teeth.
Non-profits can't afford the engineers to make a maps service work well at scale. Sure, Google is entering the revenue extraction phase of their existence, so it opens the door to competitors, but who will fill that gap? The non-profit version will be shitty compared to the next VC-funded startup paying engineers $200-$500k each to build a world-changing maps service, which they give away for free in order to grab marketshare, then they crank up the price and the cycle repeats. The low barrier to entry when the web disrupted Microsoft was an anomaly, even despite increased open source tooling, VC boom times have sucked the oxygen out of the room for non-profits and bootstrappers trying to build great tech products.
>What exactly does "force to close" mean and how does it work in a free-market capitalist society then?
There's no "free-market capitalist society". Just a really-existing capitalist society (like "really-existing socialism" which touted one set of values, but practiced another), that sells to people the lie that markets are (and can be) free, when they aren't in most ways that matters.
This is a pedantic dead-end. The market is free enough. Regulation is not a problem, as already stated, provided the legislature is looking out for citizens and making the proper laws.
None of that has to do with Google being "forced to close" its Maps just because you don't like ads.
Not really. A society can democratically decide to not have companies do this or that.
Except if you think e.g. forbidding them from using child labor or from not hiring women/blacks etc. are authoritarian too, then you already agree that a society can impose some laws (onto companies), and them to not be authoritarian.
If you agree to the above, then now the main difference is that you think the above examples are "fair" and "ok", whereas the other proposal is not. But that's a matter of opinion, not some objective truth.
A society can democratically decide to not have companies do this or that.
The only power they (we) have to enforce such policies is to stick a gun in someone's back. It's true that some matters call for the initiation of violence to maintain a greater societal good. You've cited some worthwhile examples but this isn't one of them.
If you agree to the above, then now the main difference is that you think the above examples are "fair" and "ok", whereas the other proposal is not. But that's a matter of opinion, not some objective truth.
Our Constitution lies somewhere in the middle between opinion and objective truth. It carries more weight than the former (those guns again) and less than the latter. It arguably doesn't provide the legal tools needed to force Internet search engines and map providers to work on a nonprofit basis.
There are other countries whose founding documents don't include similar constraints. Fortunately, nobody will shoot you for trying to leave this one.
Forced to close by economic forces, not legislative or political pressure. That isn't terrible at all, that's the basis of the capitalist, quasi-competitive economy which these companies champion so much. The most viable service wins. Nothing authoritarian about that.
> There's nothing stopping a non-profit group from creating maps today if they wanted to.
Apple and Google probably feel very differently. We've already seen them fight it out, wait till they join together to start keeping their boots on the up and comers.
In the end I don't give a rat's ass about their profit line and I put advancement of Earth and its people as my top priority.
"Forced to close by economic forces" is not what the other poster was saying. Competition is good. And yes, Apple and Google will put up a fight because that's how competition works.
>> I put advancement of Earth and its people as my top priority.
If a government or government-sanctioned non-profit receives enough tax credits and funding to create a viable alternative to Google Maps which puts the service out of business, it's still just market competition. We do this all of the time with banks, large American industries, oil companies, etc. You can't have one and turn away the other.
> Great. Are you working on a mapping service?
That's fallacious. I don't have a giant pile of money sitting around. But I support initiatives like OpenStreetMap even if I see room for improvement.
Again, that's not what the other poster meant by "forced to close". They specifically said maps shouldn't be provided by a for-profit company. That's the opposite of competition.
I'm not sure who you're arguing with because we all want more options, and we already have several from Apple, Microsoft and others. I definitely don't want my taxes being spent on another poorly executed govt project though.
>> I don't have a giant pile of money sitting around.
Maybe you should care about profit then because that's why Google Maps exists.
Google Maps exists because someone at Google had a very noble idea and since then Google has decided it likes service lock-in. It's not a bad product in any form.
But I don't want ads in my map software any more than I want ads in my travel atlases.
As maps go, its pretty nice - much more reminiscent of printed maps. But, its of no use for more practical tasks like providing directions, or finding restaurants.
Some services like "indexing the world's knowledge" are too important to have a government (UN?) enforced monopoly on. Doing this would be one of the best way of killing any innovation in the area.
Well, they only took us to the moon, deliver our mail, handle invasions, wars, and other emergency situations, and so on. Oh, and they also gave us this internet thing.
In fact, before the web era, they also made the best maps (e.g. the British military maps).
And today we have the ISS supplied by private space companies, UPS and Fedex and Amazon handling logistics around the world, and most aerospace and defense innovation and manufacturing handled by private contractors.
Government vs private is not mutually exclusive. Like another commenter said, the US Geological Survey already has mapping data available. Adding in traffic from local agencies and weather from the National Weather Service is relatively simple so we can definitely have a neutral public maps service. None of that requires forcing Google Maps to close though.
They are responsible, but I don't see how shoving ads into their end-users face is going to be seen positively. There are other ways to monetize a product, for example B2B.
There are two main ways an ad business grows. Create more inventory to sell, and increase the value of that inventory.
Maps data had presumably been doing the latter behind the scenes. Now it appears to also be doing the former.
Would you be ok with them using the data to improve their targeting models as long as they didn't include the placements in the Maps experience itself?
> Would you be ok with them using the data to improve their targeting models as long as they didn't include the placements in the Maps experience itself?
There was a day when I would have been OK with that, but for me, those days are long gone. I would not be OK with that now.
i'd be okay if they charged me to get rid of the ads (though that brings in all sorts of privacy issues for that to work across the many places I encounter Maps)...but ads are a serious detriment to life.
Wall St only cares about growth. If you make $100B profit two quarters in a row, that’s 0% growth and you’re dead to them. The approach makes sense with smaller companies, but it seems to kill those who reach global dominance.
> Google is no longer a technology company, and [...] it's basically [...] a search engine. The search technology was developed a decade ago, it's a bet that [...] no one else will come up with a better search technology so you invest in Google because you're betting against technological innovation in search, and it's like [...] a bank that generates enormous cash flows every year but you can't issue a dividend because the day you take that 30 billion and send it back to people you're admitting that you're no longer a technology company.
It's also not true, Apple is paying dividends and still valued as a technology company (and both Google and Apple clearly are in tech, dividends or not).
As Marc Andreessen memorably put it, Apple is valued "like a steel mill going out of business", with a PE massively lower than Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc.
> "seems like they are aggressively trying to grow even more. Maybe to raise stock price?"
it's interesting to note that google is tacitly admitting that their tentacular data ingestion products (like maps) and their vast machine-learning infrastructure by themselves can't generate the value they're expecting, so they're resorting to direct monetization. otherwise they wouldn't take another PR hit like this.
Maybe now that they changed OpenAI from a non-profit, to what they dub a new type of legal entity: a non-profit that pays out “profits” to investors - and they further claim this will be the most valuable company in history by orders of magnitude - maybe they want to milk google users which they can write off by investing in the non-profit they control effectively own (even though legally non profits don’t have owners).
There's no conspiracy, just unrestrained capitalism. This is what big business does; it's entirely unsurprising. Growth becomes an end unto itself. Google was "not being evil" while doing so served their purposes; they benefitted hugely from virtuously investing in open technologies like the web, RSS, email, and early Android. But now that they've become more powerful they don't need that stuff any more, and they stand to benefit more from building barriers and consolidating control.
This clearly shows the different priorities for Google and Mozilla, amid the current feud.
Mozilla is advocating towards a free and open internet, where the web standards are not dictated by the monetization strategies du-jour. Meaning that ads and tracking are not inherent to the internet itself, but serve a more corporate interest.
This is where Google comes in. It feels more like they consider the internet more of a platform for business growth and are no longer that unbiased.
As an example - I wouldn't be surprised if at some point they start pushing for adding product metadata to the HTML spec, say a <product> tag. This would essentially change some of the semantics of the standard. Maybe a more generalized version of this: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/product
