from Hacker News

Google Makes a Move to Take on Shopify, Amazon and Walmart

by kull on 3/20/22, 9:10 PM with 10 comments

• by OrlandoHakim on 3/20/22, 9:32 PM

  While Google has in the past been a formidable competitor, I no longer consider them a serious threat to a customer-obsessed tech company such as Shopify, Amazon or even Walmart.

  Google can't even compete on search with it's own search engine of 15 years ago in terms of the quality of the product. The entire front page is made of ads for many common searches these days, and for most searches everything above the fold is a first-party or 3rd party ad.

  As a long-time Googler and now X-Googler, I've seen the operation from the inside. Google is now a fat and arrogant monopoly that is unwilling to take risks with employees more interested in getting the next promotion than building the next big thing. They still hire amazing talent thanks to their brand and compensation, but the focus of this talent is on getting promoted or playing politics not on building products that people love.

  As an example, a few years ago they tried to take on Amazon and Instacart in a similar market - home shopping delivery. After several failed iterations, they abandoned the market, fired everyone on the project and moved on as if nothing happened. I expect a similar outcome in this case.

• by tempnow987 on 3/21/22, 12:06 AM

  What a ridiculous headline and post title.

  Amazon alone does 200B+ in product sales each year (with another 200B+ in services). The idea that google is going to be competitive with that with this "last mile fleet solutions" offering is ridiculous.

  Google should be worried that that amazon trucks will be delivering google products more than amazon worrying about being taken out by google in this space.

  Google pay has been a hot mess. Google shopping has been a hotter mess (I stopped using the variants of this). The idea that layering on last mile fleet solutions to this mess is going to "take on" Amazon. Sorry, but no.

• by steelframe on 3/21/22, 5:11 AM

  If Google Shopping is any indicator of how they're coming along, they've got a ways to go. I recently searched for refrigerator water filters and just went with the top result in Google Shopping. I ended up getting something that isn't NSF-certified, and in fact the company Google recommended to me as the top result has previously gotten in trouble by falsely claiming that their filters were certified.

  I ended up throwing them away and ordering directly from Home Depot. At least I can be reasonably sure that they will sell me something I can trust to give me drinking water.

• by ilrwbwrkhv on 3/20/22, 11:53 PM

  Google honestly is the least threatening company out of the big tech companies. Every single thing that they have tried to get into have failed or been stopped. They should focus on search, or that will go away too.

• by 8note on 3/21/22, 1:36 AM

  Im pretty confident about Shopify - while it can't demand profits like others in the list, it's platform will make the others irrelevant as pseudo-monopolies

  (Disclaimer of course, my opinion is mine alone)

• by prirun on 3/20/22, 9:27 PM

  The next step will be Google forcing their shiny new logistics customers to bid for the best route.