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I think you missed the point I was making: diversity of ecosystems is important. Microsoft provides diversity to many of the ecosystems above. Having 2-3 compet

I think you missed the point I was making: diversity of ecosystems is important. Microsoft provides diversity to many of the ecosystems above. Having 2-3 competitors is much better than a single one, and Microsoft has shown that they need to win developers by providing value to the community. I think we agree that diversity is good, I disagree that their is enough. OS's might be the only one I think is diversified enough because between Google, Win, OS X & numerous flavors of linux there are a lot of choices. There is also "the web" and Solaris & BSD as well. Google is peerless for search. Leaving aside email, apps & core other services like web infrastructure, there is no replacement for google. It is important to realize that not only is Google peerless, but that all search engines run PageRank. By that I mean, they copy pagerank by creating extremely similar algorithims and using all of the ideas google pioneered. No one has innovated in the search space except google. backlink totals is an utterly meaningless metric and authority/reputation are subjective. Google has adjusted to their original thesis of course, however everyone else adjusts to google. If you are selling something in a market that speaks English, you want to be at the top of Google. That is it. SEO means google optimization. No one can be better at being google than google, but I would likek to see someone try and be better than them at search.

Grishnakh 10y ago
>I think we agree that diversity is good, I disagree that their is enough. OS's might be the only one I think is diversified enough Here I completely disagree. In practice, there's only 2 PC OSes, the horribly broken and intrusive Win10 and the overpriced walled-garden OS X. Almost no one uses Linux on the desktop; even Linux fans have abandoned it from what I can tell, to my chagrin (they've all gone to Macs). If you're talking server-side, that's different and is really the only place where there's enough diversity IMO. As for Google being peerless, DDG works fine for me for most things. For programming help, I use Google though. And everyone knows Google totally sucks for porn.... (Bing is the leader here!) Otherwise, I do agree that diversity is good, but my point before is that there is reasonable diversity in most of those places. I don't feel any kind of compulsion to get an iPhone, for instance. Android works just fine for me and most people I know, and the iPhone users I know all seem to be deluded by Apple's marketing, and also people who really have no business buying the most expensive phone out there considering their finances.
- Grishnakh 10y ago
  Addendum: this isn't to say that I wouldn't welcome more diversity in many places. But it's not like people haven't tried: Microsoft still hasn't quite thrown in the towel with Windows Phone, but it sure never went far. Blackberry used to be a big thing, now it's basically dead. There were some other attempts, like FirefoxOS, Meego/Maemo, etc. which all flopped hard. The problem with a platform is that the things dependent on that platform become powerful, so people choose their platform based on what runs on it. If I want access to all the apps in the Google Play store, I need to run Android, not WinPhone, for instance. The same thing has hampered Linux-on-the-desktop adoption enormously (and not on webservers, since that's all standards-based and frequently uses additional stuff like PHP and MySQL which run great on Linux).

Grishnakh 10y ago

>I think we agree that diversity is good, I disagree that their is enough. OS's might be the only one I think is diversified enough Here I completely disagree. In practice, there's only 2 PC OSes, the horribly broken and intrusive Win10 and the overpriced walled-garden OS X. Almost no one uses Linux on the desktop; even Linux fans have abandoned it from what I can tell, to my chagrin (they've all gone to Macs). If you're talking server-side, that's different and is really the only place where there's enough diversity IMO. As for Google being peerless, DDG works fine for me for most things. For programming help, I use Google though. And everyone knows Google totally sucks for porn.... (Bing is the leader here!) Otherwise, I do agree that diversity is good, but my point before is that there is reasonable diversity in most of those places. I don't feel any kind of compulsion to get an iPhone, for instance. Android works just fine for me and most people I know, and the iPhone users I know all seem to be deluded by Apple's marketing, and also people who really have no business buying the most expensive phone out there considering their finances.

Grishnakh 10y ago
Addendum: this isn't to say that I wouldn't welcome more diversity in many places. But it's not like people haven't tried: Microsoft still hasn't quite thrown in the towel with Windows Phone, but it sure never went far. Blackberry used to be a big thing, now it's basically dead. There were some other attempts, like FirefoxOS, Meego/Maemo, etc. which all flopped hard. The problem with a platform is that the things dependent on that platform become powerful, so people choose their platform based on what runs on it. If I want access to all the apps in the Google Play store, I need to run Android, not WinPhone, for instance. The same thing has hampered Linux-on-the-desktop adoption enormously (and not on webservers, since that's all standards-based and frequently uses additional stuff like PHP and MySQL which run great on Linux).