<story><title>Google paid $8B to make its apps default on Samsung phones</title><url>https://thehill.com/policy/technology/4309219-google-paid-8-billion-to-make-its-apps-default-on-samsung-phones/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>crowcroft</author><text>Between this and the payments to Apple, I wonder where Google would be if they invested another $30b into competing more aggressively... I guess these payments make sense if you believe you can&amp;#x27;t effectively deliver something good with that money.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>freedomben</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;I guess these payments make sense if you believe you can&amp;#x27;t effectively deliver something good with that money.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Or, if you believe that your product is already as good as money can buy (i.e. the brightest and highest paid engineers, with an unlimited R&amp;amp;D budget, and the law of the Mythical Man-Month as an upper constraint on team size), then the money is better used elsewhere to help the product.  I don&amp;#x27;t know if this is what they believe, but it seems quite plausible to me.</text></comment>
<story><title>Google paid $8B to make its apps default on Samsung phones</title><url>https://thehill.com/policy/technology/4309219-google-paid-8-billion-to-make-its-apps-default-on-samsung-phones/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>crowcroft</author><text>Between this and the payments to Apple, I wonder where Google would be if they invested another $30b into competing more aggressively... I guess these payments make sense if you believe you can&amp;#x27;t effectively deliver something good with that money.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>maven29</author><text>Search result quality has been declining on Google since 2019. The web is increasingly turning into closed platform unindexable silos.&lt;p&gt;These payments aren&amp;#x27;t towards being the default, it&amp;#x27;s to ensure that search itself does not get replaced by a different paradigm.&lt;p&gt;You could argue that it is not a coincidence that the likes of  Siri stagnated for so long, while we saw the rise of LLMs effectively resurrecting it elsewhere.</text></comment>