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You really can’t compete against free. A large number of people use Google properties because they are free. Existence of a free product will pretty much decima
by inapis 6y ago
You really can’t compete against free. A large number of people use Google properties because they are free. Existence of a free product will pretty much decimate a large number of business models. Give it enough time and these companies will create gravity wells that start distorting society. Google’s network effects are so strong that as a consumer or a producer you cannot run away from them.
Want to use your own email server? Not going to be a piece of cake and good luck if gmail decides against you. Want to use firefox? Gmail and youtube really will move heaven and earth to make you use chrome. Want to preserve your privacy in any meaningful way? Good luck because rest of the society decided to hand over everything to Google and its free counterparts.
These companies gravity wells are so strong that they reduce meaningful choices to a consumer. In fact, give them enough time and they’ll coerce the market to behave in a particular way.
As of now, to operate as a business on the internet, you can ignore Apple, Amazon or even Facebook. You’ll have a tough time ignoring Google. Across the entire planet.
There’s no doubt that Google’s work has a lot of benefits to humanity. But that is not a license to ignore the dark side of the coin.
- dvduval 6y agoYes, indeed. And if Google is monetizing me, I don't equate that to being free. I can't tell you what I'm giving up, because Google does not share with me how much money they are making because of me.
- yeetman21 6y ago>you can ignore Apple, Amazon or even Facebook Wat is AWS? You can ignore google if you want to. I'm on firefox and I use gmail. Many companies I know use Outlook for their mail Hard is not the same as impossible
- mrep 6y ago> You really can’t compete against free. Sure you can, you can set a negative price such that you pay a user for using your service which bing literally does [0]. [0]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/rewards/search-and-earn https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/rewards/search-and-earn
- versteegen 6y ago> Want to use firefox? Gmail and youtube really will move heaven and earth to make you use chrome. What's that meant to mean? I use firefox, and I don't even see any suggestion anywhere on any Google properties to use Chrome, though there used to be something on the front page. Certainly never seen anything in gmail. I agree that gmail is a disaster for people running their own email servers, though.
- pgalvin 6y agoGoogle intentionally slows or cripples many of their products on Firefox - simply changing the user agent makes them load faster and have all their normal features. See: Gmail & Google Photos on Firefox desktop (painfully slow, fixed with user agent), Google Images on Firefox Android (functionally crippled, fixed with user agent).