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Arguably out of the big 4 (Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon) Google gave the most back to humanity: Android, Chromium, Kubernetes, Google Office suite, the Go p
by SpEd3Y 2y ago
Arguably out of the big 4 (Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon) Google gave the most back to humanity: Android, Chromium, Kubernetes, Google Office suite, the Go programming language, Tensor Flow, Alpha Fold (and Google DeepMind), donating to Linux, etc. All these are things everyone has access to precisely because Google is such a big player and can afford to lose money on innovation that fails. What did Microsoft and Apple gave us? Yet Google gets targeted while Microsoft, Apple and Amazon are left alone. Why is that?
- finnthehuman 2y agoI find selling product for money more honorable than buying indulgences with open source.
- tadfisher 2y agoYes, they provide those things. They also have an illegal monopoly on search, and use those free offerings to entrench their monopoly.
- russli1993 2y agoMicrosoft has the most monopoly. Bundle azure with office365, bundle teams with office365, bundle windows with azure, pushing bing, edge, OneDrive on windows. Why no one investigate them? Because they stay under off consumer minds, and has good lobby
- mulmen 2y agoMicrosoft famously lost an antitrust case two decades ago. They’re also currently under investigation for Azure: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/microsoft/ftc-to-probe-microsoft-over-cloud-deals-after-antitrust-complaints/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/microsoft/ftc-to-probe...
- dustypotato 2y ago> illegal monopoly on search Just by being better than bing
- nkrisc 2y agoYes, target them all.
- sebstefan 2y ago"Your honor, I made a bunch of cool stuff, anti-trust should apply to me last!" That's obviously not how it works
- SpEd3Y 2y agoYou're missing my point. In a perfect competition environment all profits go to 0. This is great for customers horrible for innovation. Innovation happens when there's enough capital to take huge risks and lose. Google had a ton of innovation attempts that flopped really hard and lost ton of money. Without the extra capital none of the attempts would have happened.
- shakna 2y agoI'm not sure I agree with you on innovation. One of the largest drivers of innovation, historically, has been war and desperation. In those circumstances, you generally can't afford to lose. So the idea of innovation needing the comfort of a soft landing doesn't really seem to fit reality.
- SpEd3Y 2y agoI agree that war pushes innovation the most, but I assume you don't want humanity to be in constant state of war. So how do you get innovation in peace time? I would argue if you're in a very competitive market and you're margins are 1-2% you cannot afford to go for innovation. Bell Labs which arguably is one of the most innovative places in peace time was the result of the AT&T monopoly. Most innovation comes out of monopolies or excess capital in peace time.
- consteval 2y agoPersonally, I think you have it backwards, hard competition breeds innovation. Large companies don't have to innovate so they don't. They coast, sometimes going many decades between major innovations. For example, Google doesn't have to change Chrome in any meaningful way to maintain (or even grow) it's market share. So, they don't. Browsers haven't changed much in a good decade and a half. That money is much better spent on marketing.
- Tepix 2y agoAll of these companies provide values, that's why they are so successful. In particular (as opposed to Google), Apple is giving us products where the user isn't just an entity that you try to get as much data from as you can. Without Apple we'd be stuck with tiny initiative such as GrapheneOS on mobile, limited to a small subset of apps and phones. With AI, Apple is also being privacy conscious, i think they are doing interesting work with their private cloud compute setup. But does it mean that Apple and Google should get a free pass? Hell no!
- felixarba 2y agoI know it's not comparable to Google, but Microsoft did significantly invest in open source, they also open sourced .NET, made TypeScript, VS Code
- SpEd3Y 2y agoFair. These are good examples of open source that Microsoft did! I love all 3 of those.
- dhruvrajvanshi 2y agoIt also made Linux viable on desktop :P WSL is my favourite Linux distro...well favourite is too strong. It's the one I hate the least.
- rty32 2y agoCurious, do run into any network/IO performance issues? Last time I checked, networking is horrible, I mean `npm install ` would time out when it works on the host without issues, and this was a well known issue. Haven't touched WSL for a while because of this.
- lofaszvanitt 2y agoThe average joe can't do shit with open source. The average coder cannot sell the fruits of the progession, because of open source. And most individuals can't do anything with open source, since they lack funding. Who profit from open source? Big companies. Don't you get it? The whole initiative is a trojan horse.
- sho_hn 2y agoGoogle Office suite isn't open source, is it?
- SpEd3Y 2y agoIt's not but it is free to use.
- sneak 2y agoNo it’s not. You have to give up your civil right to a jury trial via agreeing to a contract with Google. Just because something costs zero dollars doesn’t mean it’s free. You also give up your identity; you cannot make a Google account from a VPN without providing a non-voip mobile number. Privacy has value too.
- SpEd3Y 2y agoI'm sorry, I should have used more explicit terms: "free of monetary charge" is what I meant. Nothing can be free in this world. For some people not paying money for something but getting their privacy invaded is an acceptable tradeoff. Google should allow this free tier where your privacy is invaded and monetized or a paid tier where your privacy is intact but you pay money for that.
- tredre3 2y agoBut the Microsoft's online office also has a free tier, so how do you count that as a win for Google?
- attendant3446 2y agoBecause Google was first. Microsoft online office came a lot later and was crap in the beginning (not sure what is the state of it now).
- hnfong 2y ago> Nothing can be free in this world. All the permissively licensed works posted on the Internet, especially those in the public domain, speaks otherwise. It's up to you to decide whether you want to trade your legal rights to "free of monetary charge" services, but please don't paint all the other "free with no strings attached" things with the same brush.
- soraminazuki 2y agoBy that logic, people should still be at the mercy of AT&T because Bell Labs gave so much back to humanity. Not to mention that multiple items on your list were bought by Google. The world's biggest ad and surveillance company having control over the most widely used browser on the planet is a recipe for disaster. That's the only thing that matters in this discussion.
- SpEd3Y 2y ago> By that logic, people should still be at the mercy of AT&T because Bell Labs gave so much back to humanity. So your argument is that Bell Labs should have never happened since it's the result of a monopoly? My argument is that Monopolies are trade offs. In a world without monopolies you have very little innovation in peace time. Monopolies are bad for consumers but the trade off is that they can afford to innovate and push the world forward. It's not as black and white as people like to think. Getting rid of all monopolies and having a market in perfect competition will make Bell Labs impossible and all the innovation that came from there. A ballance is required. "There are no solutions only tradeoffs" - TS Edit: Clarify my question about Bell Labs happening.
- Woeps 2y ago> So your argument is that Bell Labs should have never happened? It was a bad thing for humanity? Yes! next question please. ;) No in all seriousness. that's not what they said. > My argument is that Monopolies are trade offs. In a world without monopolies you have very little innovation in peace time. Monopolies are bad for consumers but the trade off is that they can afford to innovate and push the world forward. It's not as black and white as people like to think. I find this argument funny, as it states: "not as black and white as people think" to then paint a black and white argument... Yes monopolies are not always bad. But one can't be serious and not acknowledge that for the most part they stifle innovation. Also, I would say some of humanities best inventions and innovations where before monopolies. But hey, that's just my "black and white" view on history ;)
- SpEd3Y 2y ago
- addicted 2y agoGoogle isn’t “getting targeted”. But to answer your question. 1. Microsoft gets left alone - Really? You may want to ask the closest adult near you about this. 2. Amazon - The government has looked into Amazon multiple times. It’s hard to see where Amazon does anything to illegally use its monopoly (they don’t use their shopping advantage to cross sell AWS in any way, or Vice versa). Amazon is genuinely not a bad monopoly (they have pushed down prices), but they are a terrible monopsony (basically destroying retailers that are not Chinese knockoffs), but monopsony protection laws are weak to non-existent world wide. 3. Apple - Apple is not a monopoly in nearly anything, which makes antitrust action against them very difficult. The EU has better laws around this, which has allowed them to force Apple to do the right thing in many cases (USB-C, opening up the App Store, although Apple complies in the worst ways possible, even though compliance has often been beneficial for them, like in the case of USB-C connectivity), but US laws are far too rigid to be able to really do much with them, as long as they are not monopolies.
- McDyver 2y ago"What have the Romans ever done for us?" Monopolies are bad, and it's not because some players were not punished that others shouldn't be (they all should). Maybe this sets a precedent, and they are all targeted.
- edelbitter 2y ago> Android [..] everyone has access One of the key issues. Google has not given me a phone OS. They have taken away my ability to chose a viable competitor, one that does not run on selling my data.
- nolist_policy 2y agoBut you can buy a pine phone or a Purism Librem phone.
- shark1 2y agoThey "gave away" to make more profits. It's strategic.
- sebstefan 2y agoIt tickled me how much power they have over the web. Do web standards even matter when Chromium's implementation is all that matters for 90% of users? I never got over that one either: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/youtube-responds-to-delayed-loading-in-rival-browser-complaints https://www.tomshardware.com/news/youtube-responds-to-delaye...
- pitkali 2y agoYeah, that kind of sucks. I liked a sibling suggestion that splitting off YouTube would make more sense because at least it could be a self-sustaining product.
- SpEd3Y 2y agoThing is Google lost money for many years in YouTube. Nowadays I think it's profitable but it seems unfair to ask a company to take loses for a decade or more and then force to sell it when it's making profit. If we set that precedent nobody will take risks with the next YouTube like company that loses money initially.
- zanellato19 2y agoThey decided to lose money. Youtube could have been profitable much sooner.
- msabalau 2y agoSo you believe that companies ought to get immunity from antitrust regulation simply because they made investments in the hopes that they'd be able to profit from their ability to dominate the competition? Regardless, if the shareholders receiving stock in the a spun off company, so is not like their investment disappears. No one (should) care about some personified "Google" as if a particular corporate structure that happened to exist was actually a human being. Also, Youtube prints an absurd amount of money, it isn't like this is some sort of change that is happening just at the moment that it finally making some money.
- elAhmo 2y agoGiving back doesn't mean you should be allowed to be a monopoly. Other companies you listed are or have been targeted by DOJ as well.
- radicalbyte 2y agoI agree regards Google (just beware I'm a massive Google fanboy) but I think that Microsoft do deserve at least a little bit of credit. Microsoft gave us (counting only OSS and things they effectively gave away): 1. Microsoft Basic, the first language of a large number of developers in the 35+ age group. This was effectively given away which is part of why it was so popular (it was a small, fixed-price fee instead of the per-unit licensing) 2. TypeScript 3. C# and the CLR 4. Visual Studio Code 5. Since 2010 they've made large contributions to Open Source. Commercially they've also been strong competition to enterprise players like Oracle and IBM and of course have done a huge amount for gaming. Apple are narcissists, they're all take take take. They do, however, provide very strong competition which pushes other players to improve.
- SpEd3Y 2y agoI agree. Love C#, VS Code and TypeScript. Microsoft changed a bit lately. But there's a lot of history with Microsoft and the recent CoPilot ripping off OSS code and blocking C# support in VS Code are still mudding the waters.
- high_na_euv 2y ago>What did Microsoft and Apple gave us? Windows, Office (Excel), .NET / C#, Vs Code, Visual Studio, free GitHub and more?
- SpEd3Y 2y agoI meant OSS or free products. Windows / Office / Visual Studio are for profit products? GitHub was free before Microsoft bought it, they just made the private repos free as well. But arguably GitHub was better before. But I do agree C#, VS Code and TypeScript are nice Microsoft OSS/Free gifts to the world.
- tredre3 2y agoOnline office is free, just like Google's. Visual Studio has a free version. Windows can be used for free (unactivated) if you're okay with the limitations.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- batmansmk 2y agoNone of them are good players for humanity. "Don't be evil" is long gone. They don't pay taxes, pollute, give means to manipulate billions of humans, concentrate wealth in a few hands. They all give with ulterior motives, never from the goodness of their heart.
- sneak 2y agoWhile I don’t disagree with your argument, it is bad form to claim that companies like these don’t pay massive amounts of taxes, specifically payroll taxes. They do and it’s a huge amount.
- batmansmk 2y agoI' m European. Apple got charged by the European Union for $14.4 billions of unpaid taxes between 2019 and 2021. Back of the mapkin they employ 22k people in EU (data Apple), average salary $80k (Apple), taxes at 30% per employee (my own understanding). Thats $550M. So their payroll taxes is about 15% of their tax package. If you have any contradictory data, I would love it, but your point is moot for 95% of the world outside California.
- Abfrage 2y agoDo you mean the tax dispute for the years 2004 to 2014, or is there another one for 2019 to 2021? One thing about this is that the Irish government made a deal with Apple and various courts have ruled in favour and against Apple in this matter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple's_EU_tax_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple's_EU_tax_dispute
- sneak 2y agoThe assertion was that they “don’t pay taxes”, which is false.
- golol 2y ago>pollute Seriously? You can't blame Google for its emissions.
- runeks 2y agoAlso: Google Project Zero. Doing Apple's work for free.
- pzo 2y ago> What did Microsoft and Apple gave us? Microsoft: VSCode, Typescript, ONNX/ONNXRuntime (TensorFlow is pretty much dead), Github, npm (they bought it but so did Google with Android - m$ still paying repo/packages hosting bill) Also worth to mention Meta: Pytorch, LLama, React, React Native, Segment-Anything
- teeray 2y ago> What did Microsoft and Apple gave us? “A computer on every desk and in every home”
- iterance 2y agoEven if you assume the situations are comparable and equitable, which most commenters are focusing on, there is still a problem: There is no reason to expect the DOJ to pursue antitrust suits against all potentially relevant companies at the same time for analogous reasons. These are complex, labor-intensive cases that frequently play off precedent established by other earlier cases. The idea that Google is being "targeted," by implication unfairly so, is out of line with how complex antitrust law can be, and the simple fact that such cases are typically serialized rather than prosecuted in bulk.
- placardloop 2y agoGoogle didn’t “give back” any of those things to humanity. Those are all products that Google is selling to you in exchange for your privacy so that they can make a profit. Don’t mistake Google for some benevolent entity that deserves special treatment for being “good”. If you want to go that path, then Apple also “gave” iPhones to humanity, as well as AirPods, iCloud, iTunes, and is a primary reason that mouse-based graphical interfaces exist. Microsoft “gave” humanity the largest home operating system, the dot net programming languages, Microsoft Office, Xbox, and more. Should we give them all a “get out of jail free” card for their good deeds?
- Ferret7446 2y agoHow is Google selling Go or Kubernetes in exchange for your privacy?
- enbugger 2y agoleave-the-multibillion-dollar-company-alone.jpg, literally
- japhib 2y agoMicrosoft had significant antitrust penalties back in the early 2000s due to windows/IE. The other 3 all have antitrust lawsuits currently going. Google’s is just the furthest along.
- hyperpape 2y ago> Chromium > What did Microsoft and Apple gave us Chromium was in the wild for five years running on WebKit, and the Blink engine they use today is an evolution of that codebase, not a rewrite. Of course, Apple did not create WebKit from scratch, it was based on KHTML/KJS, but it was WebKit that Google Chrome was built on top of, not the previous project.
- titzer 2y agoAs if Google didn't take anything from us. Google makes money selling your attention and brainpower to the highest bidder. Hands down. They are the biggest entity in the attention economy and their real customers are advertisers. Google has two billion lines of code that determine the course of your daily life. It processes incredibly sensitive information, like every interaction you have with another person in a digital medium, and has a rootkit on basically every phone that collects "anonymous usage data" that is processed in a completely opaque manner and is subject to information "requests" from illiberal and sometimes even totalitarian governments, and a few open source contributions aren't going to change that. Open source at Google is driven by engineers and contributors, not by executives or strategy. It's a fig leaf over one of the world's largest, most valuable, and well-guarded code bases that absolutely will not be made open.
- DrBenCarson 2y ago"Monopoly" is a technical definition, not another way of saying "has a lot of money." Google has been proved to be a monopoly precisely BECAUSE it gives away so much. By entrenching themselves with free products that outcompete just about anyone, they get access to a massive firehose of data that they then monetize with no competition in sight Long story short: Giving away free stuff to cripple competition who don't have scale is anti-competitive (see: Microsoft IE case)
- briandear 2y ago* The Apple I arguably changed the course of computer history. [0] * The Laserwriter and the Mac inspired desktop publishing -- the Mac was the first computers with a font library.[1] * The iPod literally changed culture. [2] * The iTunes Store made piracy less desirable changed the music industry forever. It also led the way with digital video streaming -- while Netflix was still mailing out DVDs. [3] And iPhone? Changed the world. [4] People have a hard time remembering pre-iPhone days. Samsung literally copied the iPhone. A judge in South Korea, in Samsung's home jurisdiction even ruled that Samsung copied iPhone. Android would still be a failed camera operating system if it were for iPhone leading the way. * Kubernetes -- we lived just fine without it. * Chromium? Who cares. My life isn't any different with or without it. * Google Office? Aa cloud-based productivity suite? Nothing groundbreaking there, another competitor could have (and have) built the same thing. * Go programming language? Apple gave us Swift and Objective C -- languages that are used for software running on over a billion devices. Go is a niche language. If Go didn't exist, humanity wouldn't notice. We can have a difference of opinion on the relative merit of these details, but the idea that Google gave the _most_ to humanity is absolute nonsense. Amazon for example, empowered many small sellers around the world -- giving them access to a logistics network that would be impossible for a small business to recreate. Instead of selling on Main Street, sellers now can sell to literally any street in the world. I'm not the biggest fan an Amazon, however that being said, their contribution to humanity is enormous, especially in logistics. It has also changed publishing forever in ways that provide a significant benefit to independent authors -- many of whom have made careers out of self-publishing because of Amazon. I'm not a fan of Microsoft, but their contribution to humanity is undeniable. Excel is probably the most important piece of software ever written. I'm sure others can expand on Microsoft's contributions to humanity. By the way, I'm not saying all of these companies are "good" or altruistic, I'm only rating them on "contribution to humanity." [0] https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_1692121 https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_16921... [1] https://multimediaman.blog/tag/apple-laserwriter/ https://multimediaman.blog/tag/apple-laserwriter/ [2] https://www.futureplatforms.com/blog/death-of-the-ipod-and-why-its-legacy-lives-on https://www.futureplatforms.com/blog/death-of-the-ipod-and-w... [3] https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/seven-ways-itunes-changed-the-music-industry-1559622/ https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/seven-ways-itunes... [4] https://www.vox.com/2017/6/26/15821652/iphone-apple-10-year-anniversary-launch-mobile-stats-smart-phone-steve-jobs https://www.vox.com/2017/6/26/15821652/iphone-apple-10-year-...
- slightwinder 2y ago> Google gave the most back to humanity: Android, Chromium, Kubernetes, Google Office suite, the Go programming language, Tensor Flow, Alpha Fold (and Google DeepMind), donating to Linux, etc. Most of them are tools for making money for Google. Some others are on similar level that others are contributing to open source and the world. I mean you get Microsoft Office for free too, and even with more services than Google. And, most of Googles contributions started out one or two decades ago, but are just now moving into more harmful directions. Which is a relevant point with Google. The company today, is not the same it was 10-15 years ago when they were still heavily gaining goodwill. > Yet Google gets targeted while Microsoft, Apple and Amazon are left alone. They are also getting targeted all the time. Microsoft had a long, deep anti-trust-process around two decades ago, which still sees some restriction imposed onto them. Apple and Amazon do see some targeting, but more outside the USA or by competitors, which means there is less demand for official influence on them, at the moment. Additionally, their specific influence is simply not as big and harmful as Google has it on some parts.
- vivzkestrel 2y agomicrosoft gave us VSCode from the top of my head, I could probably list 50 other things
- crvst 2y ago"Leave the multibillion dollar company alone!"
- djent 2y agoyou might need to go outside if you think Kubernetes is "giving back to humanity"