The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 352 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 5 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Evans: Google generates more revenue on iOS than on Android
“You know, Google is making more money on iOS and Android right now.”
Evans: Google contracts block OEMs from selling both Google and forked Android
“Well, the problem for them is that Google's contract says you're not allowed to sell a forked and uncompatible and open version of Android. And, or if you do, you can't sell a single phone that has Google services on it.”
Evans: Android destroyed vast wealth for mobile hardware manufacturers
“Google were actually afraid of Microsoft rather than afraid of Apple, and so they created this mobile phone platform that's been Enormously successful for Google, vast destroyer of wealth for the entire manufacturing industry”
Thiel: Easy success or early failure teaches founders the wrong lessons
“Most of the time people are either in companies that fail, and then the lesson you learn is that it's impossible to build a great company, and so the next time around you try for something that's less ambitious, and so And then you certainly will not build a g…”
Madrigal: Facebook and Google hold hegemonic control over the mobile advertising market
“Facebook and Google essentially having hegemonic control over mobile advertising, which is where everyone sees things going.”
Andreessen: Attacking founder-led incumbents is extremely dangerous for startups
“A very dangerous thing to do is to attack companies that we, that our internal term is the new incumbents. And so it's one thing to, like, go attack, you know, a tech company that's been in business for 50 years that's on its sixth CEO or something like that. …”
Evans: Google is the new Microsoft in its universal computing platform ambition
“I think there's a macro point here that Google is the new Microsoft, and this is the thing that came out really strongly last year, and indeed this year, is the sort of self-confidence and the ambition to do absolutely everything to become the global computing…”
Evans: Google views devices as dumb glass; Apple views cloud as storage
“So what Apple is doing, what Google is doing is they say, well, the device is dumb gloss, and all the cool stuff's happening in the cloud. And what Apple is doing is saying, no, no, no, no, the cloud is just dumb storage.”
Evans: Google Views Apple as a Channel, Not an Existential Competitor
“Google is not in a one-to-one fight to the death with Apple. You could argue it's in a one-to-one fight to the death with Facebook. Or even potentially with Amazon. But Apple is a channel.”
Benedict Evans: Apple and Google Both Won the Mobile OS War
“The platform war ended and Google and Apple both won, because Google and Apple both got what they wanted, but they wanted different things.”
Yahya: A Google-sized company cannot be built on top of Google
“It is inconceivable that you could build a company the size of Google on top of Google in the same way that Google was built on top of TCP IP.”
Evans: Dominant Tech Giants Always Look Invulnerable Right Before They Fall
“The winners always look invulnerable until they don't. So, IBM looked invulnerable, then Microsoft, Intel, Nokia did, then the internet giants of the last bubble, now Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon look invulnerable, but all the previous ones fell, and it was…”
Horowitz: Proprietary Deep Learning Breakthroughs Are Hard Due to Open-Source AI
“So everything out of academia is going into open source and then everything out of Google is being open sourced, and Facebook, and so forth. So it's really hard To do a proprietary breakthrough, like, you know, in, like, ok, I've got something that's, whatever…”
Horowitz: Microsoft beat Google in cloud productivity due to enterprise culture
“Google, like had, they built Google Apps, like what, like five years before Microsoft really got going with Office three 65, and Microsoft ran right by them. Why? Because there was no enterprise culture in Google, none.”
Chen: Handoff UX is a Major Challenge for Semi-Autonomous Vehicles
“Having a mixed mode, where sometimes a car drives itself and sometimes you drive it, is how do you design that user experience? How do you get the car to say, hey, I'm uncertain about what to do in this situation. You need to take over. And if you look at the …”
Evans: The internet is moving beyond Google's PageRank and web pages
“As a consequence, we've also moved on from the single unified paradigm of Google, because Google is fundamentally about analyzing links and sending you to web pages, but if the internet is no longer just about web pages, then that PageRank model breaks down, j…”
Google TPU Data Centers Require Double the Equity Check of NVIDIA GPUs
“TPUs are the second most financeable. It probably takes, I don't know, double the equity check at least. And then the rates on the rest of it are higher.”
Younis: Silicon Valley companies are myopic about global opportunities
“When I was at both at Google and at OIC, I was always surprised at how kind of almost myopic. The companies are just always looking at the market that's just like within the 30, you know, between San Jose and San Francisco.”
Evans: Microsoft, Meta, and Google spending over 50% of revenue on CapEx
“Microsoft, Meta, and Google are all on, in line to spend over 50% of revenue on CapEx this year.”
David George: Google's 7-to-8-year-old TPUs maintain 100% utilization
“Seven to eight year old TPUs, Google actually disclosed this, seven to eight year old TPUs actually have 100% utilization.”
George: ChatGPT reached 365 billion searches five times faster than Google
“The time to get to three hundred and sixty five billion searches on chat GPT was two years. The time for Google to get to three hundred and sixty five billion searches was 11 years.”
David George: Big tech can easily absorb potential AI capex overbuild
“It turns out they're the best companies, you know, probably ever created you know, companies like Google, Facebook you know, Amazon and Microsoft, and they can bear you know, potential capacity overbuild and things like that.”
Evans: Google and OpenAI cannot reliably execute Apple's Siri vision
“I mean, Google, I don't think Google or OpenAI could deliver the Siri demo that Apple gave two years ago. I mean, they could really do the demo, but they couldn't like consistently reliably make it work.”
A Google search penalty once wiped out Thumbtack's web traffic and revenue
“At Thumbtack, there was a moment, you may remember this, a decade ago, where I woke up, and I had a message from someone on our team in the Philippines, and it said, Thumbtack does not exist on the internet. I was like, what? And I went to Google, you type in …”
Rampell: Fintech startup capital is mostly wasted on Google and Meta ads
“I like to say, especially in financial services, with that high bar to having a relationship you should probably just buy Google stock or Facebook stock versus investing in most companies because, like, that's where all the money goes. It's like you, like, you…”
Vahdat: Gigawatt-scale AI workloads create power fluctuations visible to utilities
“We've written about this power utilities notice when we're doing network communication relative to computation at the scale of 1000 of megawatts. Right, like massive demand for power, stop all of a sudden and do some network communication, and then burst back …”
Vahdat: Google is driving 10x to 100x reductions in AI inference costs
“What I would say though is that maybe something people don't realize is that we're actually driving massive reductions in the cost of inference. I mean, 10 X's and a hundred X's.”
Rabois: Google's primary organizational weakness is an inability to ship products
“For Google's weakness has always been, they just don't ship products. Like they have ideas, they have researchers, they have lots of money flushing around. But when's the last time Google launched an interesting product?”
Rabois: Apple is great at devices but bad at AI, Google is terrible at hardware
“Google's been terrible at devices historically. We'll see if they can get any better, but someone, you know, Apple is great at devices, but bad at AI.”
Rampell: Google and Facebook captured most value from DTC boom
“Well, I mean, ultimately, if it's a one and done transaction, you don't really make the product like, you know, Casper didn't make the mattress, right? Like there's probably some OEM in China that made the mattress and they put their little logo and they calle…”
Rampell: Uses ChatGPT three orders of magnitude more than Google
“And then number three was just my own personal behavior of it's just like, I probably use ChatGPT like three orders of magnitude more than I use Google now, which is interesting.”
Hayes: AI and growth incentives are collapsing the open web
“And in some ways with the use of AI, like, you know, the entire open web that was the basis for the first iteration of Google is collapsing underneath it.”
Sinofsky: Claims predicting Google's demise are absurd
“Well, of course, I think the demise of Google is an absurd proposition. The demise of a giant company is, is a crazy thing to say.”
George: Web transactions will soon occur without navigating through Google
“We're getting pretty close to the point where you can actually conduct business activity on the Internet without having to go through Google.”
George: Consumer AI reached one billion users faster than any predecessor
“We've now gotten to the point where there's about a billion monthly active users of consumer AI applications, and this has grown significantly faster than predecessor companies, Google, Facebook, TikTok, and in the case of TikTok, they actually grew through, t…”
Pande: Big Tech's healthcare initiatives will remain minor side experiments
“I suspect that for those reasons, it's something that The big tech companies will try, and we've seen Apple and Amazon and Google all dabble, but I think those experiments probably won't fit the way they want to build their company, and so I think they'll stay…”
Moore: Google's Veo 2 video model likely releasing in 3-6 months
“I think we'll see even more of a shake-up here, because VO-II is the new Google model that is even next level beyond that, from what we've seen in testing, and that is probably finally gonna hopefully come out in the next, you know, three or six months.”
Moore: Tech incumbents won't build the first AI-native personal assistant
“Are they gonna build the first AI native personal assistant that works across all of your products and all of your information sources? Probably not, I would say. I think that any and all of the calls that the incumbents end up doing, which will be some volume…”
Appenzeller: All future state-of-the-art AI models will use reasoning techniques
“And I think looking forward, From now on, pretty much any state of the art model will use some of those techniques, and we've seen this already, you know, from models from OpenAI and models from Google that are structurally very, very similar, and this has hug…”
Immerman: Google AI Overviews has reached 1 billion monthly active users
“Google AI Overviews already has a billion monthly active users.”
Immerman: Perplexity average query length is 10-11 words vs Google's 2-3
“The average query on perplexity is 10 to 11 words. The average search on Google is two to three keywords.”
Schmidt: Fewer than ten organizations worldwide can train Llama-scale AI models
“Yeah, I mean, I would, it would probably be in the number of ones on my hand and it probably wouldn't use all my fingers, you know. Yeah, I mean, you basically have, OpenA, Anthropic, Meta, X, Google, and then you have a few Mistral, and then Deep Seek and a c…”
Wang: Big Tech will easily recoup AI capex through core product improvements
“If, yeah, Facebook, Google, they make their advertising systems a little bit better. They can recoup billions of dollars just by the... Better performance there. Apple can easily recoup the investments if it drives an upgrade cycle. I mean, these are things th…”
Khalaf: Payment cards have wider reach than Google, Facebook, and clean water
“Because if you think about a payment card, it's the most adopted technological product ever invented. More distribution than Google and Facebook combined. More distribution than clean water. And it's still a piece of plastic for many.”
Moore: Google will not build format-transforming AI features anytime soon
“So again, that's like the type of product that Google is probably not gonna build, or at least is not gonna build for a while, and is a real advantage for more native AI companies.”
Hicks: DoD R&D budget exceeds Alphabet, Apple, Meta, Microsoft combined
“It's more than what Alphabet, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft combined spent on R&D last year.”
Sinofsky: Voice assistant divergence will end easy dual-platform hardware integration
“Google is going to have a different set of ideas for what you can do with this device than Amazon does. And once the platforms start diverging, the idea of it being five lines of code and you get both for sort of for free is going to really change.”