411–420 of 524 posts
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> and costs $0. But then you're not the customer, you're the product, as they say. What is the cost to the actual customer to transition to an alternative?
0. The transition to bing from google costs 0.
The actual customer is the one buying ads. It's comically difficult to avoid Google if you're the one who wants to show ads.
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Just have to say this again even if everyone already knows it: If the US Government / EU hadn't threatened Microsoft they would have embedded their browser in Windows and tied it to the OS to the extent where normal people would only use their browser. I don't know if Google could exist in that alternate world, but I suspect Microsoft would have "deprived them of Oxygen" and they would be bought or crushed. You proba…
Google is so critically important to the infrastructure of the internet itself that I really struggle to understand why a for profit entity with incentives that are not aligned to the public should be in charge of the most important search engine.
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> Opera and Firefox and others are all free browsers as well And yet browser development costs money. If browsers cost money, you could make a better product and compete by selling it, but when an incumbent is giving theirs away for free?
How does your rationale explain Internet Explore/Edge and Safari which both have abundance of money and still can’t outcompete Chrome? This goes back to the original point about Google search being superior to Bing, and not just because it’s free.
Safari has largely caught up now for web standards and mostly only lags behind in experimental features that are largely driven by Google anyway. But Safari has better battery use and privacy.
Chrome is good because Google see it as their play at a web OS. That’s why they shove everything and the kitchen sink into it.
So it’s just different priorities and the resulting differentiators. I don’t think any major browser is actually significantly better anymore today.
I think we need a better term than monopoly, that separates it from what people usually mean which is 'the best product'. I literally cannot think of any sort of product or service with lower switching costs than internet search. Typing bing.com takes 0.8 seconds and costs $0. Hundreds of orders of magnitude easier than switching to a different railroad if only one goes through your town. Google is a big ass company…
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> Opera and Firefox and others are all free browsers as well And yet browser development costs money. If browsers cost money, you could make a better product and compete by selling it, but when an incumbent is giving theirs away for free?
How does your rationale explain Internet Explore/Edge and Safari which both have abundance of money and still can’t outcompete Chrome? This goes back to the original point about Google search being superior to Bing, and not just because it’s free.
How do I explain groups that attempt to compete and don't overthrow an incumbent? How much explanation does that need? That's literally the default, most attempts to overthrow the king fail.
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Ads and search are the two businesses that most directly collude and which could both survive and thrive independently. If the search business worked with other ad networks to maximize their revenue, while the ad business worked with other search engines, we’d likely see higher quality search results, less confusion about what’s an ad versus a result, and better as rates for buyers. That said I don’t support that rem…
> Ads and search are the two businesses that most directly collude and which could both survive and thrive independently. I'm skeptical that search is viable as an independent business at scale. I know DDG is making a go of it, but the business only has to pay a single salary.
My point being...of course it isn't viable right now given ... Google exists and has a stranglehold over that market...
The whole point of breaking Google up though is to make what isn't currently viable, viable.
> A fitting though unlikely outcome would be for Google to be forced to turn Chrome and the open source Chromium project over to Mozilla. That would probably involve the creation of an independent non-profit foundation that didn't reduce browser diversity – so Chrome and Firefox could continue to lead independent lives. Okay ... that is some serious wishcasting.
While we're at it, we need to break Microsoft and Amazon asap. I don't know how Microsoft is not up for discussion when it's a behemoth (GitHub, LinkedIn, Azure, Windows, Office, etc.). The same applies for Amazon.
> I don't know how Microsoft is not up for discussion when it's a behemoth Because we think interfering with the free market is necessary when a company misuses market power, not solely when it is a behemoth.
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> I don't know how Microsoft is not up for discussion when it's a behemoth Because we think interfering with the free market is necessary when a company misuses market power, not solely when it is a behemoth.
That’s not my understanding The Gilded Age Trusts were brought down regardless as to whether they misused their power. It wasn’t just oil. Monopolies are like a positive feedback loop which causes the market to diverge into a barely functional state It doesn’t matter if they abused their market position, monopolies are to be corrected, mens rea present or not