Google, every mention
398 scenes, the whole family · ← back to Google
tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone Benedict Evans 774Toni Cowan-Brown 33Bernadette Kevins 8Lillian Li 3Jeremy White 1Jay Goldberg 1Benedict Catton 1
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Google comes up
Bundling/Unbundling AI
- ▶ 16:10 Benedict Evans And then someone else says, no, you should use Google Slides so you don't have to open the document, and the document's always up to date.
- ▶ 17:02 Benedict Evans Um, I think, so there's that, there's that point of what is this for, how, what is this useful for, and I said, you know, like, the initial thing is you, if people use it and you, you, you, you treat it like it's Google, and then hopefully…
- ▶ 18:41 Benedict Evans Um, if you go back and look at, you can go into Google books and kind of browse through, um, computer magazines from the seventies and eighties, um, which I do sometimes cause I want like the example of the days when,
- ▶ 28:16 Benedict Evans So there's a bunch of, um, so there's, so there's a, there's an inside technology conversation here, which is the word thin in GPT wrapper, which is what I, what I've just described that law for legal software company will be using for the… 3 times in the scene
Unbundling ChatGPT
- ▶ 20:52 Benedict Evans Um, and this is one of the sort of basic questions of where we end up is do we end up with like three VELT computers with, with, you know, everything is a very thin open AI rack or a very thin barbed wrapper, or do we end up where there's…
Working out AI questions
- ▶ 5:20 Benedict Evans Some of these have been one of the questions we had around Google and the internet 20 years ago.
- ▶ 6:21 Benedict Evans Around LLMs, that it's like, there's Microsoft, there's Microsoft OpenAI, there's Google, and there's one other. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 12:43 Benedict Evans And you can go into the photos app, Google Photos or Apple Photos, and search for a word, and it'll find a book in a photo of somebody's shot that you took 15 years ago.
- ▶ 16:34 Benedict Evans What you then have, I think, is the error rate issue, which to me is sort of fascinating because, you know, I just saw, saw, you know, a week earlier today from, you know, sort of highly followed person, um, on Twitter and saying, well,…
- ▶ 30:38 Benedict Evans I mean, to me, this is part of the challenge of ChatTPT versus Google is that, um, Google says here are 10 links that might be the answer. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 31:53 Benedict Evans It's like, if you go to, um, um, if you go to Google and ask how do I kill myself, you don't just get a list of 10 links. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 37:39 Benedict Evans And I say, yeah, you've just, you've just done a Google search. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 37:42 Benedict Evans Google does that.
Buzzfeed News, Reddit and OpenAI
- ▶ 0:43 Benedict Evans So there's this thing, there's this thing that's been kind of bubbling around in the background, which is newspapers and newspaper lobbyists have constructed this argument that if, um, Google or Facebook link to them, then newspapers… 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 6:12 Benedict Evans If you are reliant on Facebook or Google or TikTok or anything else, you all put your business is not their priority. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 24:20 Benedict Evans I will know in the past you would have used Google. 2 times in the scene
Metaverse and crypto - beyond the BS
- ▶ 20:06 Benedict Evans Um, it's kind of not really Google Glass, because Google Glass was just a heads-up display. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 20:30 Benedict Evans No one really knows except maybe somebody inside Apple, like, or Google or something, or somebody who hasn't.
- ▶ 29:13 Benedict Evans It's not like you're relying on a screenshot of like Google Analytics, you can just see the flow.
GPT-4 is here, now what?
- ▶ 5:22 Benedict Evans Then we had both Microsoft and Google add this into their productivity.
- ▶ 22:14 Benedict Evans Like it doesn't matter how many AI ethicists at Google say no one should do race-based face recognition.
- ▶ 28:46 Benedict Evans Um, and so that's very obviously what's happening with Microsoft and Google, including this in PowerPoint and office and of course in search and everything else.
- ▶ 38:41 Benedict Evans Yeah, I mean, if you are going to, if you're going to, you know, build a new system that will just tell you what the story was without linking or giving you credit, that's very different from, um, you know, what Google and Facebook do,…
The right questions to ask about TikTok
- ▶ 26:40 Benedict Evans Well, clearly both Amazon and YouTube have unbundled Google in that sense that you go to Amazon for product and you go to YouTube for not just for quote unquote video, but for, for a lot of other stuff that might previously have been text.
Amazon's $40B advertising business
- ▶ 3:39 Benedict Evans Um, Alpha Amazon, sorry, Google's operating profit, if you remove TAC, which is what they pay Apple to be the default search engine, and if you remove, um, technology R&D, then you get like a 60% operating margin, so if you apply that to…
- ▶ 13:12 Benedict Evans Well, so part of the sort of the narrative of the presentation that I published last month, a couple of weeks ago, was, um, I called it the new gatekeepers, and kind of part of my point was, they were old gatekeepers, and they were… 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 19:35 Benedict Evans I mean, there's another sort of angle here, which is, um, the unbonding of Google, because clearly, you know, what's happened in the last decade or so is product search has moved almost entirely from Google to Amazon. 7 times in the scene
- ▶ 20:36 Benedict Evans Um, Shane, for a year or two of, um, Google Trends data for best versus cheap.
ChatGPT versus Google
- ▶ 0:31 Benedict Evans No one, search isn't a thing, and then search is a thing, but no one realizes it's important, and then Google works out that it's important and how to do it, and for at least 15 years, maybe longer, Google has been sort of two or three… 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 3:33 Benedict Evans And Google has been kind of moving along that path for, for 20 years, and Google has answered, done answering for a long time. 7 times in the scene
- ▶ 6:02 Benedict Evans So, you know, if you ask Google, 20 years ago, you'd put a search type of search query into Google. 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 11:09 Toni Cowan-Brown Like, that's, again, like, I will search on Google, and I will then open up YouTube, and I will search for answers on YouTube, and I guess that's the vertical searching in, in me, that I just, like, I know there's a couple of different, or… 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 12:45 Benedict Evans And I think the sense of the four answers in images versus the one answer for text versus the 10 blue links for Google is interesting, because all of those are different.
- ▶ 17:21 Benedict Evans You remember the story of Google testing, like, 38 different chains of blue. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 19:07 Benedict Evans Well, this is sort of, this is sort of an interesting kind of paradox here, because like, if we've said, um, that this generalizes, and now you can supply answers to any kind of question, but it might be that now, you know, if you're… 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 22:40 Benedict Evans I think a big part of the Google advantage is the huge amount of institutional knowledge of what kinds of things people do, what kinds of data there are, how you handle those. 10 times in the scene
- ▶ 29:20 Benedict Evans Um, that I'm less interested, I don't think, you know, to me, it's much less, it's more interesting to say how does search product change than is Bing's model going to be better than Google's, which I kind of, 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 31:21 Benedict Evans And then we should wrap up, which is, there's been this whole story from newspapers coming and going over the last couple of years of, um, Google and Facebook get value from the fact that there are links to our stuff on their websites,… 4 times in the scene
Generative search
- ▶ 0:51 Benedict Evans What does this mean for Google?
- ▶ 5:49 Benedict Evans And so kind of the entrenched abilities and the, the, the inertia goes away and gets reset, which is, I think one aspect of the, is this a sort of Google conversation? 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 7:03 Toni Cowan-Brown So to your point, when you go to Google and you type in something, you leave pretty quickly the moment you have your answer, which got me thinking about your point, like advertising and time spent. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 9:43 Benedict Evans And it probably gets done as part of GCP and Azure and AWS. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 22:18 Benedict Evans I search, I do a Google search, and did I want, I mean, I think the analogy I used last week was, um, when I go into a library, and I say something to the librarian, what am I saying? 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 32:52 Toni Cowan-Brown You had this at the early days of trying to ask things in Google, and you're just like, no, that's not what I'm trying to get to.
Generative AI
- ▶ 2:26 Benedict Evans You know, we've been doing this and Google has been doing this and a bunch of other people have been doing this for two or three years. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 7:23 Toni Cowan-Brown Just how we had to learn how to search on Google and find the best results and what are the best questions to ask to get the best results.
- ▶ 10:32 Benedict Evans Well, and it's always like, you know, you plug, you plug, you, you, you wanted like honor and family, and you plug that into Google Translate, and I had the result tattooed on your hand, and the Chinese person is like, I don't really want…
- ▶ 15:15 Benedict Evans Last year, and they did fact-checking, and, um, it's sort of exasperating, because like, I've been doing this for a long time, and like, I know how to calculate how many mobile phones there are on Earth, and the, um, the fact-checker had… 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 27:06 Benedict Evans And in the past, you plug that into Google and you'll get pages from people talking about how to market, but that's not actually what I want. 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 31:01 Benedict Evans Yes, and the same thing you see now, there's a whole category of, of, of queries, of how-to queries, where you'll just, you go to Google, and all you'll see is YouTube. 2 times in the scene
Why are chips interesting again?
- ▶ 7:19 Jay Goldberg And so Apple, Google,
No Soup for You! Regulating tech M&A
- ▶ 2:34 Benedict Evans Um, and tech, of course, is visible and prominent, and nobody likes Google, and nobody likes Facebook, and so that gets you to sort of that lens now being applied to M&A, which is kind of the bread and butter of part of the life cycle of…
- ▶ 7:55 Benedict Evans And so the fundamental competitive threat to Microsoft was cloud and the web and Google, which is not a PC operating system.
- ▶ 12:07 Benedict Evans Um, totally beat Google Cloud, mainly because of like knowing how to sell to enterprise and knowing how to build what enterprises have.
- ▶ 17:00 Benedict Evans It's just something that people repeat because you Google and you get that number and you say, oh, that sounds like a good number.
- ▶ 22:30 Benedict Evans Um, I mean, part of the, um, which is not part of the narrative, sort of part of the conversation, which is not, doesn't apply to Within or Activision, is, um, so last year the FTC, um, did a study where they got Google, Apple, Facebook,… 8 times in the scene
- ▶ 27:08 Benedict Evans Google, it's basically, um, um, double click, and, um, um, you could argue Waze is an interesting case there. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 30:17 Benedict Evans The irony, of course, is that they'd also be suing Google, except Google hasn't got it together to do anything like that. 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 30:22 Benedict Evans Um, I mean, there's teams, and there's teams, and hangouts, and hangouts, teams, and teams, hangouts, and Aloe, and Meet, and Meet, Teams, and Google Chat, and like, it's like GPT-III for Google messaging strategy.
- ▶ 30:22 Benedict Evans Um, I mean, there's teams, and there's teams, and hangouts, and hangouts, teams, and teams, hangouts, and Aloe, and Meet, and Meet, Teams, and Google Chat, and like, it's like GPT-III for Google messaging strategy.
- ▶ 30:22 Benedict Evans Um, I mean, there's teams, and there's teams, and hangouts, and hangouts, teams, and teams, hangouts, and Aloe, and Meet, and Meet, Teams, and Google Chat, and like, it's like GPT-III for Google messaging strategy.
ChatGPT and the Imagenet Moment
- ▶ 7:57 Toni Cowan-Brown And I can definitely see the argument why people are saying, oh, this is an alternative right now to Google.
- ▶ 24:43 Benedict Evans I go to Google, and I type in, you know, why did Japan react so much more successfully than China to the Western incursion, and I'll get a bunch of links. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 26:47 Benedict Evans And, you know, Google can't produce, Google doesn't do, you know, Google search is not going to produce original research.
- ▶ 27:36 Benedict Evans So AlphaGo, which is the Google DeepMind project to WinGo versus the parable of, you know, a thousand monkeys typing in for a thousand years will produce all the works of Shakespeare.
- ▶ 30:26 Benedict Evans Meanwhile, of course, for Google, is this the next thing that gets subsumed into Google or is it an existential question for Google? 9 times in the scene
All the other things happening in tech part 1.
- ▶ 6:49 Toni Cowan-Brown We can just Google what the products that we should be looking to, which makes sense that like anchor can sell direct to consumers.
- ▶ 9:48 Benedict Evans I, so I have a trend, a chart I often show of Google trends for best versus cheap. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 22:27 Benedict Evans It's like, um, Alphabet, Meta, ByteDance, um, and then I think Amazon, or maybe one other, I haven't got the chart in front of me, this will be published next week in my presentation. 2 times in the scene
How many metaverses?
- ▶ 25:08 Benedict Evans It's not just Google, Apple, Facebook, it's Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, um, Salesforce, um, Shopify, Okta, Spotify, um, pick 20 or 30 other companies. 2 times in the scene
Wondering about generative AI
- ▶ 0:33 Toni Cowan-Brown We've got Google coming into it.
- ▶ 25:58 Benedict Evans That, you know, if I went to Google and said, I want to see erotic Twilight fan fiction, should it find it for me or should it make it?
Figma, unbundling and $20bn of antitrust
- ▶ 4:37 Benedict Evans And the interesting thing is this is something that sort of started in a big way with things like Google Docs. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 5:11 Benedict Evans But if what you were actually doing was we need to share a table or we need to just have a hundred line model and I need to share it with 20 people to look at it, or, you know, I need to share an issue, a list of issues or a list of…
- ▶ 10:20 Benedict Evans And if you're not on Teams, you're on Google Hangouts.
- ▶ 10:33 Toni Cowan-Brown And it's no longer 10 times better than Microsoft Teams or Google meets, which has just lies now so much better than they were five years ago.
- ▶ 13:02 Benedict Evans It's going to be the better way of doing that, um, in a way that Google docs never really did for office.
- ▶ 14:53 Benedict Evans You know, it's no different, there's no switching cost in, you know, no one cares if this call is Teams or Zoom or Meet.
- ▶ 14:59 Benedict Evans Or hangouts or whatever it's called today.
- ▶ 16:03 Benedict Evans And yet in this, you know, and this is sort of a tangential point, like Google is not a player in this market.
- ▶ 30:21 Toni Cowan-Brown And yet, we still, I used it just the other day when I was trying to collaborate on a document, but my document was sat in Google Docs, and I was talking with a company that was using Teams, and whilst that team was in the office using the… 3 times in the scene
TV after software
- ▶ 11:32 Benedict Evans And Google wanted to do, and this is another piece of the story is Apple and Google sort of complete strategic failure in TV. 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 24:16 Benedict Evans Completely ludicrous idea that Google and Facebook should somehow pay newspaper companies to link to that. 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 29:48 Benedict Evans I mean, there's a side point, which is how interesting it is at Apple, and Google were unable to play any role in this at all.
A new wave of company creation
- ▶ 12:39 Benedict Evans Whereas for something like Google or Facebook or company, more recent companies, most of the gains have actually been in the private markets.
Lighting and tech diffusion
- ▶ 20:09 Benedict Evans That didn't get eaten by Google, or Amazon, or Apple.
The FTC's antitrust thesis
- ▶ 3:55 Benedict Evans And late last year, the FTC published a study that they got by collecting data from Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft, which I wrote about at the time. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 6:36 Benedict Evans And like the kind of the classic case study for this is the EU arguing over online shopping on Google, which it took them like 15 years, and so it became, it was, or 10 years, so it was completely irrelevant by the time they'd gone through…
- ▶ 11:31 Benedict Evans So like Google couldn't buy Nest, for example. 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 11:31 Benedict Evans So like Google couldn't buy Nest, for example. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 12:21 Benedict Evans Um, I mean, it's kind of interesting to go back that there's a case in a different field here, which is the DOJ is suing, um, Google. 7 times in the scene
- ▶ 25:32 Benedict Evans You're going to ban Google, Facebook, Amazon, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, Oracle, all these companies.
When the point of leverage changes
- ▶ 0:49 Benedict Evans Is Google going to do healthcare? 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 19:32 Benedict Evans Um, the other side of it is, it's a lot further away from anything that Amazon knows how to do or Apple or Google or anyone else. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 26:48 Benedict Evans So, but what's your market definition that covers Google doing search engines and cars?
- ▶ 35:57 Toni Cowan-Brown I like this way of looking at like how, whether it's alphabet getting into cars, whether it's Amazon getting into healthcare or Apple getting into banks of just like this point of leverage is changing.
Remember AI?
- ▶ 6:32 Benedict Evans And so you have one, you have one of Google or Facebook kind of have one model doing all the language stuff, and another model doing kind of all the image stuff, and maybe another one doing all the video stuff.
- ▶ 8:26 Benedict Evans And then you start seeing companies that are like, we're three PhDs, here's our CV made into PowerPoint slides, give us ten million dollars, and we'll go and register a domain name and get more by Google in six months. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 12:47 Benedict Evans Um, so if you don't know what this is, go Google it, D-A-L-L-E.
- ▶ 17:17 Benedict Evans What is the bridge from, okay, now I can do arbitrary image recognition to A, that gets instantiated in Google Photos and Apple Photos, but B, now you can build a system that does, and there's a company I saw a year or two ago, they do…