> In order to get the Play Store, an OEM has to agree to install all the other ‘required’ Google apps including Google Voice Search, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk (now Hangouts), Google Maps and so on.
>The most important clause states that "Devices may only be distributed if all Google Applications... are pre-installed on the Device." Google apps are an all-or-nothing affair. If you want Google Maps or the Play Store, you must also take things like Google+ and Google's network location provider.
You do realize though, there's an intentional segregation there. Android is not the play store or any of those apps. Not at this point. Android is that OS itself and just the OS. If antitrust is an issue, then the case needs to be made against the distribution of apps that require licensing (google's apps and the store), not against android itself, which is fairly unrestricted.
Actually, Android is a Google trademark and you have to do what Google says if you want to use it.
Amazon uses AOSP but it can't call it Android.
This makes sense. Anyone could take AOSP and make it incompatible with Android (TM). If they could call it Android, that would mislead consumers.
The problem is that if you ship a single Android phone with Play etc, you are not allowed to ship any phones based on AOSP. In fact, Google just made Acer cancel the launch of an AOSP phone aimed at the Chinese market because it is already shipping genuine Android (TM).
Google develops and distributes Android Open Source OS for free. The costs for these activities are offset by Google's revenues from the other products like Google+. This is Android's business model. Also many phones come pre-installed with many other apps. Google does not firbid this. All of this is mentioned in TFA.
Well that's a fairly misleading comparison. Where is the screenshot for Outlook.com which has no ads either?
Not to mention the fact that Gmail is valuable to Google because it gets people to sign in in all the browsers they use, allowing them to track them via cookies on all Google properties including search.
The "World's Most Valuable Advertising Business" does things like track which physical stores Android phone users and Google maps users on iOS visit.
Plenty of Android OEMs install adware and bloatware, sometimes which cannot even be uninstalled, so I guess people are already conditioned to this.
You can drop something that doesn't exist but was announced. Thechnically Skylake support for Win7 wasn't announced, but the effect is the same since there was an implicit expectation that the feature would come.
>Thechnically Skylake support for Win7 wasn't announced, but the effect is the same since there was an implicit expectation that the feature would come.
From where did this implicit expectation come from?
Windows 7 mainstream support ended in Jan 2015 and that was known since forever.
Extended support implies:
>Microsoft no longer supplies non-security hotfixes unless you have an extended support agreement
>All warranty claims end
>Microsoft no long accepts requests for new features and design changes
But I presume dropping support just means not being able to use the latest features.
Even a very old system image of windows 7 will run on the very latest skylake. It doesn't need the very latest updates. I doubt they will create a kill switch in a windows update that refuses to boot if the system detects a too modern CPU.
How much of Google's profit(or even revenue) is not from tracking user data and advertising?
Search, Gmail, Android, Chromebooks, Nexus, Pixel, Youtube, Maps etc. everything is about selling advertisements after scanning user provided data.
The rest are either loss leaders or moats, or ones with unclear monetization scenarios like Fiber. One exception is GCE and GAE, but I don't know how much profit/revenue they're making. I would count Google Apps, but until recently they were scanning even paid Google Apps for Business accounts for ad tracking purposes.
They use AI to sell advertising and services (be it search relevancy, contextual awareness, filter out spam, etc)...
The reason why it's not incorrect to call Google an AI company is that Wall Street thinks they'll be able to shake out ever more cash from their machines in the future because of their position in ML and AI. It's their competitive edge and one that becomes more and more valuable as software continues to eat the world.
Your question is answered explicitly in the press release, if you wanted to Google it. But are you instead making a point about how that's bad or something? The business model is to give away services for free and then show ads to monetize, that's no secret. Do you contend this is a poor business model, or somehow immoral or something?
Well, abusing their search dominance among other things like making ads indistinguishable from organic results and paid placement on verticals like shopping/hotels etc. was eventually going to pay out.
More details on how Google manipulated search rankings manually to make more money:
>A previously undisclosed report by staffers at the Federal Trade Commission reveals new details about how Google Inc. manipulated search results to favor its own services over rivals’, even when they weren’t most relevant for users.
>In a lengthy investigation, staffers in the FTC’s bureau of competition found evidence that Google boosted its own services for shopping, travel and local businesses by altering its ranking criteria and “scraping” content from other sites. It also deliberately demoted rivals.
>For example, the FTC staff noted that Google presented results from its flight-search tool ahead of other travel sites, even though Google offered fewer flight options. Google’s shopping results were ranked above rival comparison-shopping engines, even though users didn’t click on them at the same rate, the staff found. Many of the ways Google boosted its own results have not been previously disclosed.
>One way Google favored its own results was to change its ranking criteria. Google typically ranks sites based on measures like the number of links that point to a site, or how often users click on the site in search results.
>But Marissa Mayer, who was then a Google vice president, said Google didn’t use click-through rates to determine the ranking for its own specialized-search sites, because they would rank too low, according to the staff report
>Instead, Google would “automatically boost” its own sites for certain specialized searches that otherwise would favor rivals, the FTC found. If a comparison-shopping site was supposed to rank highly, Google Product Search was placed above it. When Yelp was deemed relevant to a user’s search query, Google Local would pop up on top of the results page, the staff wrote.
>Other regulators have found similar practices. European antitrust authorities in 2013 said Google had a different, “specialized” search algorithm for ranking its own content.
>To bolster its own listings, Google sometimes copied, or “scraped,” information from rival sites. According to the FTC report, Google copied Amazon’s rankings of how well products were selling, then used that information to rank its results for product searches. Amazon declined to comment.
>While Google promoted its own results, it sometimes demoted rivals, the FTC staff found. For example, Google compiled a list of comparison-shopping sites and “demoted them from the top 10 web results,” staff wrote. According to the report, Google users in tests didn’t like the changes; only after Google tweaked its search algorithm at least four times, and changed the ranking criteria, did the new results get “slightly positive” feedback, the staff said.
>Google’s efforts paid off, the FTC found. It said Google’s maneuvers reduced Web traffic to rivals, and increased traffic to Google sites.
Google's purpose is to give users the most relevant results. No Google algorithm update goes through without users liking it; it doesn't matter how much profitability it increases.
The parent of your response points to an FTC report (an internal one that was leaked).
Within that report, they show how Google was able to tweak the questions until end users stopped liking something they did like with the previous set of questions.
The questions being tweaked were specifically about a type of site that competed with Froogle/Google Shopping that Google wanted demoted.
Except, for example, when Google decides to provide inferior results (ie inferior as determined by Google search), which may still result in anti-trust action in Europe
> Google's purpose is to give users the most relevant results.
No. Google's purpose is to extract as much money as possible from advertisers. In other words, they find the most stupid and desperate scum willing to pay the most per whatever (i.e. "10x growth hackers"), then separate them from their wallets.
I only started referring to MS as M$ after I had been working there for a year. I joined them with cautious optimism, because the new CEO had finally gotten rid of that atrocious stack ranking system.
That optimism did not last long. I only stayed there as long as I did because of how much they were paying me. Referring to them as "M$" is disturbingly appropriate given that all they do is to throw huge amounts of money at problems until they go away.
Have you ever seen how much Microsoft will pay you? Those sort of people often end up as very good programmers. Not that surprised that people in this camp end up working at Microsoft and then quit because they don't like working there.
It's very telling that you get a 3 year free Google Drive storage account with 1TB or so storage instead of more local storage on Chromebooks.
The terms of service allow them to mine all your documents etc. for keywords once it's in their cloud. Otherwise why would they sell Chromebooks at or below cost.
That's the real reason they don't want a auto-update. Google pays them a lot for bundling Chrome(I think it's around $1 per install). They keep breaking the auto-update on purpose so that they can make a ton of money by bundling other software. Same with Java updates.
Shock, the only browser that still uses NPAPI is the descendant of the one that invented it!
Really, at this point I think Mozilla is more interested in just getting rid of plugins than trying to implement an alternative to NPAPI - why put all the effort in to support something like PPAPI when plugins should be dead within the decade anyway?
>The most important clause states that "Devices may only be distributed if all Google Applications... are pre-installed on the Device." Google apps are an all-or-nothing affair. If you want Google Maps or the Play Store, you must also take things like Google+ and Google's network location provider.