8 ms·

It's interesting to that it took this long, just considering the utility of each company. If Apple disappeared tomorrow I'd be moderately inconvenienced, I'd h

It's interesting to that it took this long, just considering the utility of each company. If Apple disappeared tomorrow I'd be moderately inconvenienced, I'd have to pick up an Android handset instead of my iPhone and maybe set up some new podcast feeds. If Google disappeared the world would screech to a halt.

jad 11y ago
How's that? To search the web, I'd go to DuckDuckGo or Bing or whatever. Other companies also provide web mail, maps, office document solutions, etc. Google's definitely better at those things, but using a worse version of those products would not cause the world to "screech to a halt." Probably the most disruptive thing if Apple vanished would actually be every tech company suddenly needing to figure out how to use Windows or desktop Linux.
- sdrothrock 11y ago
  We could probably think of alternatives for most of these things, but there are a lot of people who just use what came with their phone/browser. Additionally, think of all of the Google-backed services out there provided by other companies. How many companies use gmail heavily that would lose all kinds of records? Normal people would lose their e-mail too, and businessmen would lose a lot of their calendars. The actual solution doesn't matter as much as the data already invested in Google's solutions that would be lost if Google just vanished.
  - tedmiston 11y ago
    And Google Takeout continues to ensure that won't happen.
    - Thirdegree 11y ago
      Only for people that proactively use it. Speaking of which, I should probably backup again.
  - latj 11y ago
    The world wouldnt screech to a halt though. We're talking about what would happen if Google disappeared and its not a hypothetical situation. It happened in China for a five year period starting in 2010. People who used Google services were very upset. Replacements sprung up and quickly improved. They never caught up to Google but they were good enough, along with propaganda and the threat of prison, to keep people from making more of a commotion. The biggest loss to humanity (in my opinion) would be all the translation data they hold privately. But Google really just people and money. If Google the entity disappeared tomorrow all those people who still know how to do the work will just start working on it elsewhere and catch up quickly.
    - sdrothrock 11y ago
      > We're talking about what would happen if Google disappeared and its not a hypothetical situation. It happened in China for a five year period starting in 2010. My bad. I was thinking about what would happen if Google disappeared as in, one day their servers and services just aren't available for whatever reason, rather than a staged transition/fade out.
  - smileysteve 11y ago
    Critically 20 years ago, nobody could have pictured living without AOL, they had search, the directory, email, Aim - and connectivity. 15 years ago, few people could have seen a world without Yahoo. 3 months ago Dorsey said Twitter is an essential part of the internet.
- JesseObrien 11y ago
  As far as "screech to a halt." is concerned, it's maybe a little on the exaggerated side, but I'd believe it. I've worked for 5 different companies of varying sizes from 5 to 1000 employees. All of them have used Google Apps to run their business. Email, Calendars, Docs, Basically the Apps suite in it's entirety is the core of communicating and information storage. There's arguments for backups, etc but in reality if the common business person working at these companies sits down and none of their Google products work, their day will halt.
  - hammock 11y ago
    Google Apps has 50 million users, iCloud has 125 million Edit: to clarify, my source[1] said 5 million orgs with 50 million individual users. Not counting Gmail obviously [1]http://blog.bettercloud.com/google-apps-stats/ http://blog.bettercloud.com/google-apps-stats/
    - tempestn 11y ago
      iCloud users are mostly individuals. Google Apps users are largely businesses with users of their own.
    - itcmcgrath 11y ago
      Having worked on the Drive team, I can assure you Google Apps (which includes GMail, the Docs editors, and Drive) has much more than 50 million. A quick search on public figures for these services will give better numbers. Edit: Those are Apps for Work numbers, excluding consumers - obviously you can't compare just a subset with a total.
      - toomuchtodo 11y ago
        Why does Drive lack where Dropbox has succeeded (efficient, reliable syncing)? (Honest question, since you mentioned you're on the Drive team)
        deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
- funkyy 11y ago
  None search engine comes close to Google atm. Also Google marketing and SEO employs a much, much bigger number of people than people working as a freelancers related directly to Apple I assume. (not employees, the freelancers and companies that use the Google/Apple as platform to run their businesses)
- taoeffect 11y ago
  Seriously, I don't need anything Google related. Not search, not devices, not email, not even analytics (thank you Piwik)! But if Apple disappeared I'd be screwed.
- jhuckestein 11y ago
  DuckDuckGo uses Google search results
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    Please don't spread information that is factually incorrect, especially not if it concerns a small company trying to compete with a much larger one. "In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we primarily source from Yahoo!, and in some regions and scenarios, Yandex and Bing. From: https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources
  - firloop 11y ago
    I thought DDG used Yandex for search?
- pavanky 11y ago
  Every tech company is a bit of a stretch. Get out of california more.
- toxican 11y ago
  I love the idea of DuckDuckGo, and I used them for a year or so before I realized every other search resulted in frustration and me appending a !ge to it. So yes, there are alternatives, but I don't find them to be nearly as good.
- ant6n 11y ago
  I once went to China, without Google. My online life screeched to a halt. On the other hand, there were a few Chinese people there, and most of them seemed to have a non-halted life.
bhauer 11y ago
> If Google disappeared the world would screech to a halt. I agree that Google vanishing in an instant would have a more tangible short-term effect than Apple doing the same. But I feel you paint them as (nearly) opposite ends of a spectrum. Google provides many centralized services that people have come to depend on, whereas Apple creates physical products that would continue to function even if the company ceased to be. But Apple provides some similar centralized services and its various stores that sell virtual products (apps, music, video). Either disappearing would be inconvenient for a lot of people—notably those who use centralized services—but my opinion is that in both cases, people would adapt fairly quickly. All that said, as someone who doesn't use services or products provided by either of these two companies, my instinct is to agree with you that Google feels like it provides greater net value to society than Apple.
- zpatel 11y ago
  you say this now that the smartphone is more of a commodity but indeed apple made huge impact by revolutionizing the smartphone market, google has a monopoly in search platform like FB has in social , thats the only difference.
marincounty 11y ago
If Goggle dissapeared, and it might through anti-monopoly laws, I would just move on to another search engine. What am I missing? I don't know all the ins and outs of Google.
- jacinda 11y ago
  Gmail, Google Maps, Google Apps for Business, Android...just to name a few...
  - ionised 11y ago
    There are alternatives to all those things. I don't use any Google services, personally.
- timmyd 11y ago
  Well consider the number of 3rd party services that would shut or require a significant amount of development to get back online as a result of google shutting down: https://developers.google.com/apis-explorer/ https://developers.google.com/apis-explorer/ There's a lot of services that depend on Google and changing all that code overnight is unlikely. Apple doesn't have that kind of 3rd party reach.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > If Goggle dissapeared, and it might through anti-monopoly laws Google might (unlikely, but remotely possible) get split up by antitrust action, but it won't disappear through it, the same way AT&T didn't.
hollerith 11y ago
By the same reasoning, the most valuable companies should be the dominant suppliers of food, water, electricity and maybe gasoline and basic internet connectivity.
- Dr_tldr 11y ago
  You mean like ExxonMobil, Comcast, and Monsanto? Wait, what was your point?
  - Tycho 11y ago
    Monsanto isn't really that big.
    - nathancahill 11y ago
      Dow-DuPont would have been a better example.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > By the same reasoning, the most valuable companies should be the dominant suppliers of food, water, electricity and maybe gasoline and basic internet connectivity. No company is as dominant in any of those areas as Google is in its area, or they probably would be. Water and electricity are often public utilities; while there are big food companies, there's no parallel to Google; there are a number of major oil companies, but no one single dominant one -- but those of the many in the top tier that are publicly traded are valued highly (from tens of billions to hundreds of billions), and several are not public so that no public valuation exists.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
pinaceae 11y ago
if it is so mission critical, why can it only be financed through ads?
zepto 11y ago
If this is true, expect them to lose some antitrust cases soon.
deleted 11y ago
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deleted 11y ago
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deleted 11y ago
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rayiner 11y ago
Eh. People would use Bing. But if Microsoft disappeared the business world would grind to a halt, and with it the rest of the economy.
- eitally 11y ago
  Not really, speaking as an IT leader at an F500 still running NT4.0 workstations and some Win98 desktops. Unsupported, isolated on VLANs to avoid infection, but still running. The same company is still mostly using Office 2003. If MS has 3rd party entanglement with VARs and SIs, Google has the same with developers & startups. I'm honestly not sure which would be worse for the economy if it disappeared.
morgante 11y ago
Switching the operating system for all my devices (especially my desktop) would be substantially harder than switching my search provider.
jrbapna 11y ago
Utility isn't necessarily correlated with profitability. Craigslist/wikipedia being obvious examples. Apple's good at making products that people will pay a premium for.
zeeshanm 11y ago
I am already on DuckDuckGo and I love it.
biztos 11y ago
In the insanely unlikely event either company disappeared, it would mostly provide market opportunities; and how much it might "hurt" in the meantime is a very personal thing. I'd sure miss my iPhone or my Macbook Air way before I'd miss Google Maps or Search, the two Alphabet products I use religiously. Others might feel differently. If Google were abducted by space aliens I'd immediately start an online ad exchange supported by a ubiquitous cookie. If Apple were likewise abducted I'd fork Android and hire a good industrial designer and try to eat Samsung's lunch before they come to their senses. Neither company makes anything the average user can't live without, and neither company has a monopoly on stuff that excites nerds like us. Both are very very good at some things, sure, but let's not pretend the world really needs them per se.
simonh 11y ago
I think we don't know what we would miss out on. Suppose Apple had disappeared before releasing the iPhone or iPad? Suppose Google had disappeared before it launched Wave or Glass?.....er... Ok, cheap shot, but seriously though, without these companies flagship products the world would be a poorer place. Even their competitors products would be significantly poorer. But it's not so much the present that would suffer from the loss of these companies as it is the future.

jad 11y ago

How's that? To search the web, I'd go to DuckDuckGo or Bing or whatever. Other companies also provide web mail, maps, office document solutions, etc. Google's definitely better at those things, but using a worse version of those products would not cause the world to "screech to a halt." Probably the most disruptive thing if Apple vanished would actually be every tech company suddenly needing to figure out how to use Windows or desktop Linux.

sdrothrock 11y ago
We could probably think of alternatives for most of these things, but there are a lot of people who just use what came with their phone/browser. Additionally, think of all of the Google-backed services out there provided by other companies. How many companies use gmail heavily that would lose all kinds of records? Normal people would lose their e-mail too, and businessmen would lose a lot of their calendars. The actual solution doesn't matter as much as the data already invested in Google's solutions that would be lost if Google just vanished.
- tedmiston 11y ago
  And Google Takeout continues to ensure that won't happen.
  - Thirdegree 11y ago
    Only for people that proactively use it. Speaking of which, I should probably backup again.
- latj 11y ago
  The world wouldnt screech to a halt though. We're talking about what would happen if Google disappeared and its not a hypothetical situation. It happened in China for a five year period starting in 2010. People who used Google services were very upset. Replacements sprung up and quickly improved. They never caught up to Google but they were good enough, along with propaganda and the threat of prison, to keep people from making more of a commotion. The biggest loss to humanity (in my opinion) would be all the translation data they hold privately. But Google really just people and money. If Google the entity disappeared tomorrow all those people who still know how to do the work will just start working on it elsewhere and catch up quickly.
  - sdrothrock 11y ago
    > We're talking about what would happen if Google disappeared and its not a hypothetical situation. It happened in China for a five year period starting in 2010. My bad. I was thinking about what would happen if Google disappeared as in, one day their servers and services just aren't available for whatever reason, rather than a staged transition/fade out.
- smileysteve 11y ago
  Critically 20 years ago, nobody could have pictured living without AOL, they had search, the directory, email, Aim - and connectivity. 15 years ago, few people could have seen a world without Yahoo. 3 months ago Dorsey said Twitter is an essential part of the internet.
JesseObrien 11y ago
As far as "screech to a halt." is concerned, it's maybe a little on the exaggerated side, but I'd believe it. I've worked for 5 different companies of varying sizes from 5 to 1000 employees. All of them have used Google Apps to run their business. Email, Calendars, Docs, Basically the Apps suite in it's entirety is the core of communicating and information storage. There's arguments for backups, etc but in reality if the common business person working at these companies sits down and none of their Google products work, their day will halt.
- hammock 11y ago
  Google Apps has 50 million users, iCloud has 125 million Edit: to clarify, my source[1] said 5 million orgs with 50 million individual users. Not counting Gmail obviously [1]http://blog.bettercloud.com/google-apps-stats/ http://blog.bettercloud.com/google-apps-stats/
  - tempestn 11y ago
    iCloud users are mostly individuals. Google Apps users are largely businesses with users of their own.
  - itcmcgrath 11y ago
    Having worked on the Drive team, I can assure you Google Apps (which includes GMail, the Docs editors, and Drive) has much more than 50 million. A quick search on public figures for these services will give better numbers. Edit: Those are Apps for Work numbers, excluding consumers - obviously you can't compare just a subset with a total.
    - toomuchtodo 11y ago
      Why does Drive lack where Dropbox has succeeded (efficient, reliable syncing)? (Honest question, since you mentioned you're on the Drive team)
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
funkyy 11y ago
None search engine comes close to Google atm. Also Google marketing and SEO employs a much, much bigger number of people than people working as a freelancers related directly to Apple I assume. (not employees, the freelancers and companies that use the Google/Apple as platform to run their businesses)
taoeffect 11y ago
Seriously, I don't need anything Google related. Not search, not devices, not email, not even analytics (thank you Piwik)! But if Apple disappeared I'd be screwed.
jhuckestein 11y ago
DuckDuckGo uses Google search results
- jacquesm 11y ago
  Please don't spread information that is factually incorrect, especially not if it concerns a small company trying to compete with a much larger one. "In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we primarily source from Yahoo!, and in some regions and scenarios, Yandex and Bing. From: https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources
- firloop 11y ago
  I thought DDG used Yandex for search?
pavanky 11y ago
Every tech company is a bit of a stretch. Get out of california more.
toxican 11y ago
I love the idea of DuckDuckGo, and I used them for a year or so before I realized every other search resulted in frustration and me appending a !ge to it. So yes, there are alternatives, but I don't find them to be nearly as good.
ant6n 11y ago
I once went to China, without Google. My online life screeched to a halt. On the other hand, there were a few Chinese people there, and most of them seemed to have a non-halted life.

bhauer 11y ago

> If Google disappeared the world would screech to a halt. I agree that Google vanishing in an instant would have a more tangible short-term effect than Apple doing the same. But I feel you paint them as (nearly) opposite ends of a spectrum. Google provides many centralized services that people have come to depend on, whereas Apple creates physical products that would continue to function even if the company ceased to be. But Apple provides some similar centralized services and its various stores that sell virtual products (apps, music, video). Either disappearing would be inconvenient for a lot of people—notably those who use centralized services—but my opinion is that in both cases, people would adapt fairly quickly. All that said, as someone who doesn't use services or products provided by either of these two companies, my instinct is to agree with you that Google feels like it provides greater net value to society than Apple.

zpatel 11y ago
you say this now that the smartphone is more of a commodity but indeed apple made huge impact by revolutionizing the smartphone market, google has a monopoly in search platform like FB has in social , thats the only difference.

marincounty 11y ago

If Goggle dissapeared, and it might through anti-monopoly laws, I would just move on to another search engine. What am I missing? I don't know all the ins and outs of Google.

jacinda 11y ago
Gmail, Google Maps, Google Apps for Business, Android...just to name a few...
- ionised 11y ago
  There are alternatives to all those things. I don't use any Google services, personally.
timmyd 11y ago
Well consider the number of 3rd party services that would shut or require a significant amount of development to get back online as a result of google shutting down: https://developers.google.com/apis-explorer/ https://developers.google.com/apis-explorer/ There's a lot of services that depend on Google and changing all that code overnight is unlikely. Apple doesn't have that kind of 3rd party reach.
dragonwriter 11y ago
> If Goggle dissapeared, and it might through anti-monopoly laws Google might (unlikely, but remotely possible) get split up by antitrust action, but it won't disappear through it, the same way AT&T didn't.

hollerith 11y ago

By the same reasoning, the most valuable companies should be the dominant suppliers of food, water, electricity and maybe gasoline and basic internet connectivity.

Dr_tldr 11y ago
You mean like ExxonMobil, Comcast, and Monsanto? Wait, what was your point?
- Tycho 11y ago
  Monsanto isn't really that big.
  - nathancahill 11y ago
    Dow-DuPont would have been a better example.
dragonwriter 11y ago
> By the same reasoning, the most valuable companies should be the dominant suppliers of food, water, electricity and maybe gasoline and basic internet connectivity. No company is as dominant in any of those areas as Google is in its area, or they probably would be. Water and electricity are often public utilities; while there are big food companies, there's no parallel to Google; there are a number of major oil companies, but no one single dominant one -- but those of the many in the top tier that are publicly traded are valued highly (from tens of billions to hundreds of billions), and several are not public so that no public valuation exists.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

pinaceae 11y ago

if it is so mission critical, why can it only be financed through ads?

zepto 11y ago

If this is true, expect them to lose some antitrust cases soon.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

rayiner 11y ago

Eh. People would use Bing. But if Microsoft disappeared the business world would grind to a halt, and with it the rest of the economy.

eitally 11y ago
Not really, speaking as an IT leader at an F500 still running NT4.0 workstations and some Win98 desktops. Unsupported, isolated on VLANs to avoid infection, but still running. The same company is still mostly using Office 2003. If MS has 3rd party entanglement with VARs and SIs, Google has the same with developers & startups. I'm honestly not sure which would be worse for the economy if it disappeared.

morgante 11y ago

Switching the operating system for all my devices (especially my desktop) would be substantially harder than switching my search provider.

jrbapna 11y ago

Utility isn't necessarily correlated with profitability. Craigslist/wikipedia being obvious examples. Apple's good at making products that people will pay a premium for.

zeeshanm 11y ago

I am already on DuckDuckGo and I love it.

biztos 11y ago

In the insanely unlikely event either company disappeared, it would mostly provide market opportunities; and how much it might "hurt" in the meantime is a very personal thing. I'd sure miss my iPhone or my Macbook Air way before I'd miss Google Maps or Search, the two Alphabet products I use religiously. Others might feel differently. If Google were abducted by space aliens I'd immediately start an online ad exchange supported by a ubiquitous cookie. If Apple were likewise abducted I'd fork Android and hire a good industrial designer and try to eat Samsung's lunch before they come to their senses. Neither company makes anything the average user can't live without, and neither company has a monopoly on stuff that excites nerds like us. Both are very very good at some things, sure, but let's not pretend the world really needs them per se.

simonh 11y ago

I think we don't know what we would miss out on. Suppose Apple had disappeared before releasing the iPhone or iPad? Suppose Google had disappeared before it launched Wave or Glass?.....er... Ok, cheap shot, but seriously though, without these companies flagship products the world would be a poorer place. Even their competitors products would be significantly poorer. But it's not so much the present that would suffer from the loss of these companies as it is the future.