Google Will Collapse

mozilla will collapse before google

> For all its efforts, the money Google earned from its nonadvertising ventures only ever accounted for a mere 15% of their revenue.

15% of Google's revenue is still a quite large business. Having online advertising badly weaken isn't enough to kill the firm, unless they sell the profitable parts to try to bail out the unprofitable core business.

The assumption that Google will collapse is probably still true, but only because most companies don't last long term. The bigger firms often take quite a while to fade though.

A more likely scenario is that Google will fund an army of bloggers and lobbyists to create propaganda to make regulators forget the fact that they have a monopoly. Then Google will keep extracting rents from corporations in return for allowing those corporations to maintain top rankings in Google search results. In this environment, small companies will struggle to compete for user attention because they cannot afford a large enough advertising budget to be in the top rankings for any significant keyword even at a local level. CPC is prohibitively high.

The Federal Reserve banks of the world keep printing fiat money out of thin air and injecting it into government bonds which governments then spend on enormous consulting contracts and other useless government services offered by these corporations. This 'free money' essentially flowing directly from the Fed to governments to corporations allows corporations to increase their advertising budgets beyond any reasonable economic measure.

Small companies start dying like flies; in this environment which is adverse to small companies (where exposure to customers is prohibitively expensive and where big government contracts are out of reach), big corporations will discover that they can significantly cut back on the quality of their products and use a portion of the savings to further increase their exposure and rankings on Google. This creates a vicious cycle where products keep getting worse, but corporations keep getting stronger and customer acquisition costs keep going up.

Eventually, all small companies are dead. Everyone in the world is employed by a corporation. Governments start introducing laws to allow corporations to fire employees who vote for political candidates which the corporation does not approve. Corporations share data with each other so getting fired from a corporation means instant homelessness for the individual; they will never find a job again. Family members will receive a warning from their own jobs if a relative is fired.

Corporations then move to have the minimum wage abolished. Corporations then start paying employees with accomodation and food instead of money; they make the case that doing so makes the system more efficient overall and that this is for the good of everyone.

A bit dated and sensationalist, but still has some good points.

Maybe Google won’t collapse outright, but they are facing challenges on a lot of fronts. Everything from employees unionising, antitrust legislation both at home and abroad, massive loss-leaders like YouTube, and advertising market challenges.

Worst of all is probably the reputational damage. They used to be the darling of technologists everywhere, but countless privacy- and monopolist scandals have taken their toll. There’s a growing anti-Google sentiment, and once lost, reputation is hard to recover.

Why is this here then? It's petty and unnecessary to embarrass this author by digging up his incorrect predictions from years ago.