The latest cuts come as the company enjoys its fastest growth rate since early 2022, alongside improving profit margins. Last week, Alphabet reported a 15% jump in first-quarter revenue from a year earlier and announced its first-ever dividend and a $70 billion buyback.
Of course not. Why would I risk limiting our market share that way?
I demonstrate synergy and the ability to run an agile ship by instead outsourcing development of an app charging 1,000,000,000 people $15 monthly for the privilege of pressing the button and posting that they weren't it this month.
Then I press it, because we must make sure our actions align with increasing shareholder value.
Yup, and that's why monopolies are bad. Once you get a dominant position, the way to increase profits is by abusing your market position. And publicly traded companies need to increase profits because that's what shareholders expect.
In this case, reducing the quality of search means people need to search more often, which means they see more ads. As a double-whammy, if you improve the relevance of the ad results while reducing the relevance of the regular results, you get more click-through on the ads. So Google has little incentive, while it has a dominant position, of having a good search product. They'll only care again if that dominance gets threatened.
I already made this comment on a completely different post, but it's funny to see it's fruition. McDonald's executives bitching that fast food price increases have priced a lot of their low income customers off their menu... like they had no hand in it
I could imagine them letting AI (or offshore workers) manage everything, and keeping the managers around with chatbots reporting in to the managers, so they wouldn’t know they were being replaced.