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Google has a ton of competition across all of its products. It's dominating in some of them but being better then your competition is a lot different then there

• kuschku 9y ago
  Google beats the competition in some markets because they have so much power in other markets. If you start a startup even in cloud photo storage, and suddenly Google Photos comes along, you’re dead. No one will fund you anymore, and you’ve basically lost. Google has such an immense amount of network effect, and of knowledge they can gain from dominating in other markets, that if Google enters a market – unless there’s regulations or network effects that prevent this – they immediately dominate it.
  • throwaway91111 9y ago
    Maybe that's a sign that photo storage is already commodity and such a startup shouldn't be funded.
    • drucik 9y ago
      I'm sure that such attitude doesn't help innovation
      • angryasian 9y ago
        Well I don't see why funding should be a consideration. Maybe they should release a better product based off of a viable business model.
      • deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
  • zitterbewegung 9y ago
    What about imgur?
    • kuschku 9y ago
      Imgur exists based on the network effect – its pitch was "hey, there’s this huge community called reddit, we can start by providing photo services to them, and then expand, once we have a large enough community and the network effect applies". And that’s exactly what they’ve done.
  • klipt 9y ago
    Doesn't Apple have iCloud photo storage that pretty much all iPhone owners use by default? I find it difficult to see Google as a monopoly when Apple has an even bigger market cap.
    • ubernostrum 9y ago
      Try to start a video-sharing service. Go ahead, I'll wait. What will happen is that you will get a flood of DMCA takedown notices, and Google will get a flood of DMCA takedown notices for your site. Then Google will penalize you in search rankings for being a source of so many DMCA notices. Meanwhile, YouTube -- which generates far more takedown claims than you ever will -- is exempt from that ranking penalty because it's a Google service. The same is true of a lot of other areas; Google can and does use ranking penalties and placement priorities on the search-result pages to give preferential treatment to its non-search businesses. How will you compete with that?
      • deelowe 9y ago
        There are tons of video sharing services. Arguably Twitch is doing a pretty good job of taking on youtube. Do you expect a competitor to simply copy youtube and be successful? Business doesn't really work that way.
        • ubernostrum 9y ago
          I don't mean a live-streaming service. I mean a place where you upload videos for on-demand viewing by others. You will have an uphill battle against Google ranking penalties, while YouTube gets a free pass.
          • Klockan 9y ago
            You can view old sessions in Twitch so they definitely get a lot of DMCA requests as well. See: https://www.twitch.tv/p/dmca-guidelines https://www.twitch.tv/p/dmca-guidelines
          • 9y ago
  • blfr 9y ago
    Which markets do they really dominate? I can only think of search and Android.
    • ticviking 9y ago
      Online video, particularly for creators who want to earn based on someone else selling ads on their videos.
  • ng12 9y ago
    So how do you feel about Apple? When Google wins it's because they make a better product than the other guy. Apple can deliver a clearly inferior product (e.g. the last 5 years of iTunes) and still win because their customers are using iDevices. Google doesn't have that lock-in and they still do really well which makes me feel like they're not really a monopoly.
    • ticviking 9y ago
      I think a big part of it is that Google controls one of the single most effective advertising channels to drive the growth of a competitor, and can therefore strangle them in the cradle.
      • dannyr 9y ago
        Wait Google does not allow its competitors to use Adsense?
        • ticviking 9y ago
          Fair response there. They have unilateral power to bury someone in search results though. Which can effectively require them to use adsense. I don't think this is reasonable. Buy our other product or get poor search results. There's a few really good examples on other threads here. The best example I saw involved a hypothetical YouTube competitor facing a large number of DMCA takedowns, they may be complying with the law, but the takedowns will give google an excuse to bury them in search results forever more, while they can "excuse" YouTube.
    • kuschku 9y ago
      I consider that also unfair, just like I consider Microsofts participation in the browser market unfair. That said, I know that splitting companies until they only do one thing isn’t possible. But Google’s scale of domination is quite unique. Especially recently, as they’ve forced Android devs into using Google services more and more.
      • 9y ago
  • abraham 9y ago
    Google didn't enter the photo sharing/hosting market with Google Photos. It entered with Picasa Web Albums and 2006 and Photos was just a rebranding and new UI for that.
  • nickik 9y ago
    That's true for almost all large companies. Why would invest in some startup X if Boing announces the same product? Size gives you advantage, but its not an auto win.
    • dannyr 9y ago
      To add, Yahoo, Excite, Altavista were much bigger companies when Google entered the search space.
  • angryasian 9y ago
    You must not be paying attention to all the failures that google releases. Google dominates email, but waves and even inbox I would say aren't catching on. They are failing in mobile messaging. Even though they own a huge part of your social graph through phone and email, they still can't get social right. Google owns ITA but Google flights is not the first place you look for plane tickets. Google also owns Zagat, but foursquare and yelp still dominate. I think the argument only looks at the wins and completely ignores everything else.
    • kuschku 9y ago
      > They are failing in mobile messaging Because there is a pre-existing market with network effects. The one thing that Google just doesn’t 'get' are network effects. Regarding Yelp!: Google has spent a lot of effort (leading even to confrontation in court) trying to kill Yelp!’s business already.
      • angryasian 9y ago
        > pre-existing market with network effects. (a phenomenon whereby a product or service gains additional value as more people use it.) Google has network effects as well as they own Android dialer, hangouts, google messenger, and email. I don't buy this argument. They just failed. Also you'd be the first person I'd see that defends Yelp's business model, but yeah I'm not familiar with the Google vs Yelp court case.
        • kuschku 9y ago
          > Also you'd be the first person I'd see that defends Yelp's business model, but yeah I'm not familiar with the Google vs Yelp court case. Google copied Yelp!’s ratings, showed them without any backlink in Maps and Places. Once Yelp! complained, Google told them to either suck it up, or to use robots.txt to opt-out of Google search entirely. "If you want to be in the index, you have to allow us to scrape your data and present it however we want". This is a big part of the current EU Antitrust case, btw.
  • notatoad 9y ago
    Google has enough failed projects in their portfolio to prove this argument wrong. If they could make a product successful just by abusing their network effect, they'd be able to get Google+ or Hangouts off the ground. Also, Google Spaces, Android TV, Android Auto, Duo, Allo... Google Photos has crushed all the other startups in the space because it's so good, not because it's been forced on everybody by a monopoly. Their other apps that aren't good enough to take over a market don't take over a market.
    • kuschku 9y ago
      Hangouts, Duo, Allo, Auto are all things I already had accounted for. Because they have the issue of existing competitors with network effect. > Google Photos has crushed all the other startups in the space because it's so good And why is it so good? Because Google uses an advantage they gained from (partially illegally) datamining user data. Google Duo is better than Skype, Google Allo is better than Telegram. They don’t take over the market only because Skype and co have existing userbases – network effect.
      • notatoad 9y ago
        >Google Duo is better than Skype, Google Allo is better than Telegram. Sure, if you want to pick the weakest competitor, they're better. Duo competes with facetime, not skype. Allo competes with WhatsApp, not Telegram. Yes, part of what makes Google Photos good is the integration with their other products. "network effect" is a thing. But leveraging your other products is not the same thing as being an illegal monopoly. iCloud Photos has a network effect. Facebook's photo sharing product has a much larger network effect than Google's.
        • kuschku 9y ago
          > Duo competes with facetime, not skype. Allo competes with WhatsApp, not Telegram. Yet Allo has less users than IRC, or Signal, or Telegram. And Duo has less than Skype. The network effect is very powerful, and the network effect of social contacts is stronger than the network effect of software integration.
• pcwalton 9y ago
  > Google has a ton of competition across all of its products. It's dominating in some of them but being better then your competition is a lot different then there not being any. This was also true for Microsoft. There were plenty of other operating systems, even PC ones.
  • nerfhammer 9y ago
    And switching to bing for search is orders of magnitude easier than switching operating systems.
    • yamaneko 9y ago
      Don't forget Android. EDIT: doesn't make your point about switching search engines less valid. It is orders of magnitude easier to change than an OS. But Google now spans other areas besides search.
  • beagle3 9y ago
    But unlike Google (AFAIK), Microsoft played very dirty - they eventually paid for it (see e.g. [0]), but the gains from remaining a not-even-threatened monopoly where at 100-1000 times larger than what they paid. I experienced this first hand at a company I worked for in the early '90s - we had agreements signed with many PC manufacturers to include our software (which was a DOS launcher of sort, that -- in those days of Win3.0 barely coming out, was more favored by users than Win3), and then all of a sudden, within 3 weeks, every single one of the manufacturers canceled -- and it later turned out Microsoft just visited each and every PC manufacturer and told them their MSDOS "discount" is going away if they bundle our launcher or anything similar. In other markets, e.g. Office. in which, at the time, they were not a dominant player (Lotus123 was king, Borland Quattro was a strong player, Excel was less so; WordPerfect was king of pword processing), they actually competed by turning out better products. [0] http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240052523/BeOS-will-live-on-as-Microsoft-settles-legal-action http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240052523/BeOS-will-live...
    • pcwalton 9y ago