The Bill Gates Line
Here's the actual "Bill Gates Line" that the title references
> And I remember when we raised money from Bill Gates, 3 or 4 months after — like our funding history was $5M, $83 M, $500M, and then $15B. When that 15B happened a few months after Facebook Platform and Gates said something along the lines of, “That’s a crock of shit. This isn’t a platform. A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it. Then it’s a platform.”
> Remember the conditions that led to Facebook’s rise in the first place: the company was able to circumvent Google, go directly to users, and build a walled garden of data that the search company couldn’t touch.
Umm, not really. In the relatively early days of Facebook, Google allowed Facebook access to its "Contacts API" which let Facebook peek into your contacts and find out your GTalk/GMail contacts on Facebook. GTalk was the popular IM client pre-Facebook Messenger and your "social network" resided within your e-mail plus IM client. OTOH, Facebook did not allow access to its "Contacts List" citing privacy concerns (talk about irony!). Google eventually stopped Facebook from access to GMail/GTalk contact lists [0]. Facebook complained but did find a work around to export contact lists [1]. Twitter found a work around to get access to Facebook contact lists - by using the Facebook app for Twitter [2]. But lady irony died again when, Facebook blocked Twitter's ability to do so [3].
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2010/11/04/facebook-google-contacts/
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2010/11/08/facebook-finds-a-new-way-t...
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2010/06/23/twitter-facebook-friends-l...
[3] https://techcrunch.com/2010/06/23/facebook-blocks-twitter/
Pertinent to revisit Yegge's famous platform rant[1].
Companies like calling themselves platforms—more so in the modern times—because they can usually provide one or dimensions of value. For everything else, they need external entities to bring in value which in turn brings more users. Facebook, for instance, could have simply been a directory of friends, maybe with a chat feature and would have continued being that till the next Facebook took its place. They'd have never been a 'social network platform' However, to make money and commoditize the swath of data users were giving Facebook and in turn, make users give them even more data, they needed other companies to provide value in a few other dimensions—games from Zynga, articles from publishers, ads from everyone under the sun. For this, they had to become a platform and market themselves as such.
It is the same case with say Google where they needed companies like Rotten Tomatoes, or Wikipedia to exist so Google can make search results better. Platform today isn't what the Bill Gates quote indicates but is just a way for companies to meet their value providers halfway. I have the data, come build services on top of it. It is a win-win till it isn't—see the Weather Channel pulling out of FB videos[2].
Maybe platforms of yore vied to make their value providers richer than they are, but platforms of today are goldmines for value providers to commercialize that value. For instance, YouTube creators are the value providers without whom YouTube isn't valuable, but for those value providers to make money off the content they create, they are reliant on YouTube. Each YouTube channel is a company of sorts as many many YouTubers are doing it as their full-time job. To say that the value providers' companies should be more expensive than YouTube itself is a funny proposition.
There's a small mental disconnect at the beginning of this article.
The author accuses 60 Minutes of not balancing the story. But does so immediately after noting that Google refused to talk to 60 Minutes.
Sounds like 60 Minutes tried to balance it, but Google wasn't interested in or capable of providing that balance.
An alternative would have been to get industry types to try to explain Google's side of the story, but that's not usually a good idea since nobody really knows what Google is up to except Google. Anyone else is just speculating.
Please humor me this reductio ad absurdam question: So does that make a toothbrush company a platform? Because arguably lots of people are avoiding cavities, and that fact seems more economically valuable than the total dollar value of all the toothbrushes sold, or the net present value of all the toothbrush customers in the world. What am I missing here? (I don't think a toothbrush company is a platform company, for the record).
> Gates said something along the lines of, “That’s a crock of shit. This isn’t a platform. A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it. Then it’s a platform.”
Funny how the largest tech companies and many silicon valley startups of this wave are trying to do the opposite.
I think the article misses one important point. Google is not just an aggregate. They are also a publisher/provider and therefore have massive advantage in placing their products within the results: Home, YouTube, GCP, Gmail, Shopping(!), Etc.
This is the problem, not that they are an aggregator.
Google has had the luxury of operating in an environment — the world wide web — that was by default completely open. That let the best technology win
What is the effect of Google? Is the web now more or less open than it used to be? Has any of that change been attributable to Google?
It's ironic that the report criticizes 60 Minutes for being biased while showing its own bias in the same paragraph
> The 60 Minutes report was not exactly fair-and-balanced; it featured an anti-tech-monopoly crusader , an anti-tech-monopoly activist, an anti-tech-monopoly regulator, and Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman
Characterizing these people, especially Margrethe Vestager, as "anti-tech" (i.e. simply being against technology) when they're just critical of certain aspects and developments in the industry and don't paint such a rosy picture, is very misleading.
The underlying reasoning about Yelp's argument here is not that great:
> There are three problems with this argument [that the answer box is anticompetitive]... First, the answer box originally included content scraped from sources like Yelp and other vertical search sites; under pressure from the FTC, driven in part by complaints from Yelp and other vertical search engines, Google agreed to stop doing so in 2013.
This is not really a problem with the argument. Scraping content is just another form of anticompetitive behavior.
> Second, in a telling testament to the power of being on top of search results, Google’s ratings and reviews have improved considerably in the two years since that video was posted...
Also not really a problem. Blocking your competitors is probably going to help you gain more market share, which is a major factor in the quality of crowdsourced content.
> Third — and this is the point of this article — what Yelp seems to want will only serve to make Google stronger.
So, Google is incapable of engaging in anticompetitive behavior by blocking Yelp because they're really only hurting themselves in the long run if you really think about it? This is contorted reasoning. Even if blocking competitors is an ill-advised strategy, it is still anticompetitive behavior.
I’m not sure I buy this thesis. If companies were not making more money than they were spending then they wouldn’t be advertising. This suggests that the vast majority of the value is captured by the ecosystem and not Facebook or Google. Moreover, how many billions of people get value from Google and Facebook every day?
From a user of both services, and not a lawyer - Yelp has burned all benefit of the doubt by seemingly basing their business on deception. I find using Yelp to be extremely difficult as I end up frequently reading an advertisement instead of a review despite double-checking first (!), I find myself locked out of Yelp content frequently (I have an account! Maybe I'm not signed in? Who knows? Or am I trying to use the website and not their app? etc).
Yelp frequently leads users to believe they have information right in front of them when the user has no such thing. Given that this is the current state of affairs, and has been for years (always?) I would think Yelp would have exactly 0 credibility when it comes to them trying to make things "fair" in search results.
Why should a society bend for Yelp when Yelp has done everything in their power to deceive us through poor UI, poor UX, misleading links, what I would even call false advertising? We shouldn't.
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Edit: As a point of comparison, on Google you know when you're reading a review and when you're seeing an ad right away, there's no confusion or deception or lies there.
This guy doesn't know how to write concisely
Hmm, this is interesting but not completely clear.
In this paradigm, what's the difference between a platform and a tool?
It's always surprised me that Yelp, like Flickr, and other early services, became stagnant when the mobile transition happened, and failed to leverage the opportunity.
Why didn't Yelp early on see that they could become OpenTable, or GroupOn? In China, services like Dianping combine all three plus mobile payments: Restaurant reviews, booking, discounts, and payment, and even delivery services.
Surely Yelp could have seen how other crowd sourced content farms became commodities? Yelp is trying to blame their problems on Search, but the real problem to me is that they failed to adapt their business model in the face of a sea change in computing and from mounting pressure from competitors like TripAdvisor.
The Yelp CEO seems to be indulging in the classic approach when your business model fails to resort to patent lawsuits, copyright lawsuits, or begging anti-trust regulators for regulatory capture.