> On the other hand, google could take over almost any business like this.
I have never worked with a technology company that would in danger of being taken over in this way. The examples you list are all free information you can find on the internet, which is precisely google's business. To run afoul of monopoly laws they need to do things like build their own restaurants and route searches to them rather than the other local restaurants the user was looking for. I assume they are doing this in some cases. But the last thing I want is to do a search and find the result list giving a bunch of new pages of lists, with yet more ads of course, to sift through next.
Software engineers are enjoying a nice run, where one can make lots of money applying basic software skills anyone can learn, grabbing free info anyone can get, and utilizing libraries everyone gets with their computer/phone OS but has not been provided access to by their hardware vendor. Hopefully technology will keep changing so fast the run will last forever (as long as you keep hopping to the newest bleeding edge). But this seems like borrowed time to me, access to free info and your own computer's clock or whatever is a commodity anyone can provide, whether it's someone earlier in the chain selling the hardware, or just millions of hungry programmers in developing countries.
Yes, that's true, the info is free in a sense that someone published it on the internet. But taking the weather companies as an example, someone has to measure the weather, and then compute the predictions. That'a real cost someone needs to pay. And that I think is the reason some people don't like what Google is doing - they are displaying the temperature, while someone else paid for it to be measured.
TBF though, weather is like the worst example of rent seeking. The people that provide the most value to weather reporting and prediction is the federal government through the a National Weather Service. Private companies usually just repackage the free government provided reports, or they do some analysis on top of the government provided data.
That’s what has always made AccuWeather’s attempt to “privatize” (in reality stop having the government publicly publish forecasts, but continue the hard work of data collection) the weather service transparent rent seeking.
Agreed. weather.gov is maybe a bit ugly but works great, and is mobile optimized.
Although I disagree with other point, spokeo and fastpeoplesearch is the absolute worst example of digging through private info of millions and "only consolidating it". SWEs working on this type of stuff are either immature or have no soul in my opinion
Google Search weather data is provided by weather.com in a commercial relationship with Google, so either Google is paying for the data like everyone else, or weather.com is providing it at their cost for their own reasons.
I have never worked with a technology company that would in danger of being taken over in this way. The examples you list are all free information you can find on the internet, which is precisely google's business. To run afoul of monopoly laws they need to do things like build their own restaurants and route searches to them rather than the other local restaurants the user was looking for. I assume they are doing this in some cases. But the last thing I want is to do a search and find the result list giving a bunch of new pages of lists, with yet more ads of course, to sift through next.
Software engineers are enjoying a nice run, where one can make lots of money applying basic software skills anyone can learn, grabbing free info anyone can get, and utilizing libraries everyone gets with their computer/phone OS but has not been provided access to by their hardware vendor. Hopefully technology will keep changing so fast the run will last forever (as long as you keep hopping to the newest bleeding edge). But this seems like borrowed time to me, access to free info and your own computer's clock or whatever is a commodity anyone can provide, whether it's someone earlier in the chain selling the hardware, or just millions of hungry programmers in developing countries.