5 ms·

It's becoming clear to me that Google has become a far, far worse monopoly than Microsoft ever was. Microsoft just controlled our computers; Google controls our

It's becoming clear to me that Google has become a far, far worse monopoly than Microsoft ever was. Microsoft just controlled our computers; Google controls our access to history.

Stubb 6y ago
And each other.
beagle3 6y ago
Potentially far worse - but Google did not yet stop progress for 10 years in multiple fields the way MS did. They sucked the air out of advertising (in cooperation with Facebook) leaving none for others. But I consider that a small loss. Microsoft did that for operating systems, productivity software, stalled the web with IE6, and more. Google is capable of much more damage, for sure. But they haven’t done that damage just yet.
- skinkestek 6y ago
  > Google is capable of much more damage, for sure. But they haven’t done that damage just yet. That is changing extremely fast.
- walkingolof 6y ago
  > Google did not yet stop progress for 10 years in multiple fields the way MS did. I beg the difference, Gmail have not changed much since I signed up 16 year:ish etc They are all the same, as soon as competition goes away, this happens.
  - anchpop 6y ago
    I'm still upset with them for killing Inbox
    - harha 6y ago
      I used that as an opportunity to leave most Google services all together, the product decisions just can't be trusted from a user perspective. For most services there's a better alternative (e.g. DuckDuckGo with bangs for search, native apps whenever possible, markdown for notes and texts) - in general this was a learning process for me to distrust systems that control me more than the other way around by creating a lock-in to an ecosystem. I feel it's worth taking the time to understand systems a bit more. Once the learning is there, much of the convenience that Google offers can be replicated through good processes and automation.
    - master-litty 6y ago
      Me too. I still don’t understand why it was killed.
  - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
    But Gmail is interoperable with other mail systems and they didn't create incompatible extensions to email (AFAIAA); that's quite different to how IE6 was. If Gmail required emails themselves to be in a special format that broke other MUA and IE6 wouldn't render standards compliant emails in a way you could read. That would be analogous to what IE6 was up to.
    - jcranmer 6y ago
      > If Gmail required emails themselves to be in a special format that broke other MUA and IE6 wouldn't render standards compliant emails in a way you could read. Gmail is as notorious as IE6 was for its rather poor support of HTML and CSS in email.
    - simpss 6y ago
      take a look at AMP for emails... https://amp.dev/about/email/ https://amp.dev/about/email/
      - jefftk 6y ago
        amp4email is open for anyone to support, and per https://blog.amp.dev/2019/03/26/building-the-future-of-email-with-amp/ https://blog.amp.dev/2019/03/26/building-the-future-of-email... it's supported by Yahoo Mail, Mail.ru, Outlook, and Gmail. It's not comparable to IE-only features. (Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
      - _-___________-_ 6y ago
        Christ. If that's "the future of email", I'm going back to writing letters.
- WorldMaker 6y ago
  > Microsoft did that for operating systems, productivity software, stalled the web with IE6 Android, GSuite, Chrome
  - beagle3 6y ago
    Google are smart enough to maintain a duopoly (iOS, Office/365, Safari) Whereas Microsoft tried to kill all competitors (and all too often succeeded). That’s a huge difference.
    - WorldMaker 6y ago
      So far. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Though Android's marketshare today is extremely similar to Windows compared to macOS early in the period for which Microsoft is criticized. Similarly, Safari and Firefox combined have low enough marketshare (currently estimated around 21%) versus Chrome estimated 65% (and growing) to make real, very concerned comparisons to the early parts of the IE6 era, if not its peak (yet). The difference is that it is still early and Google hasn't killed their competitors yet. I can't tell you whether or not they are "trying" to, just that I agree with the above poster that Google has the potential to be worse, and possibly history repeating itself on some of the exact same product lines.
- moomin 6y ago
  I dunno, I look out at the world and think that maybe making journalism unprofitable may have had some negative effects that are a bit bigger than web standards not advancing that fast?
  - an_opabinia 6y ago
    You’re absolutely right. Though the same people who complain about the loss of profitable journalism also run adblockers and sub/unsub from major newspapers over their op-eds.
    - Avicebron 6y ago
      Personally I would pay a decent subscription to a journal or newspaper if they offered incredibly high quality content ad-free. Instead what we have are cheap ad-saturated papers competing with each other to the lowest common denominator. It's a vicious cycle kicked off by Google and co.
      - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
        To get to be a 'journal or newspaper that offers incredibly high quality content ad-free' you need funding. Arguably you also need to go up against the richest and most powerful people in the World, and you need to protect against someone buying it and shutting it down. You need a lot of principles and some money, getting those things together in the same place seems hard. Was news in the past better ( more comprehensive? more verified?), or just better presented?
        Avicebron 6y ago
        I'm of two minds on this and they aren't totally squared together, but I think they are both fair. 1. I'm somewhat nostalgic to physical newspapers for a couple of reasons, I think because they were physical and required a little bit more effort. They felt more authoritative and verifiable, that's the nostalgia. However I think there was another benefit to the journalists, because they were crafting a physical body of work, I probably naively believe it instilled a sense of duty in that work. Personally I feel like if my product (not code) was a fleeting piece of information, easily changeable and forgotten among a deluge of other work. I would not feel as obligated to honor the craft. So in short, less comprehensive and better verified and presented. 2. News was concentrated, I don't think this was necessarily a good thing. This is somewhat contradictory to 1. But I think this concentration was an easier to accept narrative and speaking to my above point, that presented a level of even-headedness to the whole affair of understanding the world and our place in it. The firehose that was unleashed with Google was good, but it then signaled the death of lots of rational measured thought and brought us to where we are today.
- hysan 6y ago
  Disagree in that they’ve already done plenty of damage. Easiest example is with RSS - entered the RSS Reader market for free and at a loss and effectively killed competition because you cannot compete with that. Then subsequently killed Google Reader. This chain of moves essentially drove RSS to being obsolete which in turn made everyone far more reliant on Google and social media. Now extend this to other products that they’ve started for free and subsequently killed. It’s not the same as embrace, extend, extinguish, but the result is the same. You kill off competition and stunt progress.
  - beagle3 6y ago
    I don’t think RSS is a good example. Everyone I know who used google reader switched to a different RSS reader; It’s mostly that RSS isn’t monetizable as easily as web pages. I think FB and Twitter dropping their feeds had a more significant effect; regardless, RSS was always niche.
    - DoctorNick 6y ago
      Yeah, they all realized how much tracking and advert impressions you lose with RSS. It seems like that's happened with a lot of web technologies that aren't conducive to that since Google's taken the reins.
    - hysan 6y ago
      If we’re going to go with anecdotes, I can counter with all of my friends (entirely non-technical) simply stopped consuming via RSS because there were no alternatives at that time that ticked all the boxes. For me, the key is that Google Reader actually killed off competing products during its existence. Then when they killed of Google Reader, that stunted the ecosystem because anyone who wanted to provide an alternative was starting from the ground up. All the time that could have been spent driving RSS forward was instead spent on catchup. FB and Twitter dropping their feeds may not have happened if the RSS ecosystem evolved to benefit them in some way.
      - specialist 6y ago
- Lammy 6y ago
  > stalled the web with IE6 By inventing XMLHTTPRequest?
ajuc 6y ago
How evil you are is a function of how much power you have and for how long.
nabla9 6y ago
Google is becoming worse monopoly trough natural evolution of it's core business. It seems more offhand way. Network effects and economies of scale. Microsoft monopoly grew by planning and plotting. Bill Gates had genuinely sinister motivations and used deception and dirty play. To fix problems caused by Google, you need to change the principles of competition law. Microsoft was knowingly doing lots of stuff that violated laws. It was just very hard to prove it.
- PaulStatezny 6y ago
  Do you have any links to evidence of these statements about Microsoft? I'd be interested to read more.
  - nabla9 6y ago
    It's kind of weird to get this question when you lived it and there seems to be relatively little to Google. I mean, it was all in the news, trade magazines, business journals. Blackmailing OEM's, intentionally breaking things and making them incompatible. At least the legal battles are documented somewhere and Wikipedia has something about them, but they were just the tip of the iceberg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars There must be book somewhere. Dan Gilmour's articles in San Jose Mercury news from 90's should be somewhere. Basically small software startups had to have Microsoft Strategy. They had to find way to stay out of Microsoft radar or MS would steal their work, their developers or block them. You sue them like Stack did and MS just stalls few years and pays few millions in damages. It was worth of losing in court to protect monopoly. Big OEM's like Dell had to do what MS said or MS would up their price. It was straight blackmail from monopoly position.
- DoctorNick 6y ago
  Yeah, that's the main reason that there isn't as much push back to the control that Google is starting to exert over all of us.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

It's becoming clear to me that Google has become a far, far worse monopoly than Microsoft ever was. Microsoft just controlled our computers; Google controls our access to history.

Stubb 6y ago

And each other.

beagle3 6y ago

Potentially far worse - but Google did not yet stop progress for 10 years in multiple fields the way MS did. They sucked the air out of advertising (in cooperation with Facebook) leaving none for others. But I consider that a small loss. Microsoft did that for operating systems, productivity software, stalled the web with IE6, and more. Google is capable of much more damage, for sure. But they haven’t done that damage just yet.

skinkestek 6y ago
> Google is capable of much more damage, for sure. But they haven’t done that damage just yet. That is changing extremely fast.
walkingolof 6y ago
> Google did not yet stop progress for 10 years in multiple fields the way MS did. I beg the difference, Gmail have not changed much since I signed up 16 year:ish etc They are all the same, as soon as competition goes away, this happens.
- anchpop 6y ago
  I'm still upset with them for killing Inbox
  - harha 6y ago
    I used that as an opportunity to leave most Google services all together, the product decisions just can't be trusted from a user perspective. For most services there's a better alternative (e.g. DuckDuckGo with bangs for search, native apps whenever possible, markdown for notes and texts) - in general this was a learning process for me to distrust systems that control me more than the other way around by creating a lock-in to an ecosystem. I feel it's worth taking the time to understand systems a bit more. Once the learning is there, much of the convenience that Google offers can be replicated through good processes and automation.
  - master-litty 6y ago
    Me too. I still don’t understand why it was killed.
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago
  But Gmail is interoperable with other mail systems and they didn't create incompatible extensions to email (AFAIAA); that's quite different to how IE6 was. If Gmail required emails themselves to be in a special format that broke other MUA and IE6 wouldn't render standards compliant emails in a way you could read. That would be analogous to what IE6 was up to.
  - jcranmer 6y ago
    > If Gmail required emails themselves to be in a special format that broke other MUA and IE6 wouldn't render standards compliant emails in a way you could read. Gmail is as notorious as IE6 was for its rather poor support of HTML and CSS in email.
  - simpss 6y ago
    take a look at AMP for emails... https://amp.dev/about/email/ https://amp.dev/about/email/
    - jefftk 6y ago
      amp4email is open for anyone to support, and per https://blog.amp.dev/2019/03/26/building-the-future-of-email-with-amp/ https://blog.amp.dev/2019/03/26/building-the-future-of-email... it's supported by Yahoo Mail, Mail.ru, Outlook, and Gmail. It's not comparable to IE-only features. (Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
    - _-___________-_ 6y ago
      Christ. If that's "the future of email", I'm going back to writing letters.
WorldMaker 6y ago
> Microsoft did that for operating systems, productivity software, stalled the web with IE6 Android, GSuite, Chrome
- beagle3 6y ago
  Google are smart enough to maintain a duopoly (iOS, Office/365, Safari) Whereas Microsoft tried to kill all competitors (and all too often succeeded). That’s a huge difference.
  - WorldMaker 6y ago
    So far. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Though Android's marketshare today is extremely similar to Windows compared to macOS early in the period for which Microsoft is criticized. Similarly, Safari and Firefox combined have low enough marketshare (currently estimated around 21%) versus Chrome estimated 65% (and growing) to make real, very concerned comparisons to the early parts of the IE6 era, if not its peak (yet). The difference is that it is still early and Google hasn't killed their competitors yet. I can't tell you whether or not they are "trying" to, just that I agree with the above poster that Google has the potential to be worse, and possibly history repeating itself on some of the exact same product lines.
moomin 6y ago
I dunno, I look out at the world and think that maybe making journalism unprofitable may have had some negative effects that are a bit bigger than web standards not advancing that fast?
- an_opabinia 6y ago
  You’re absolutely right. Though the same people who complain about the loss of profitable journalism also run adblockers and sub/unsub from major newspapers over their op-eds.
  - Avicebron 6y ago
    Personally I would pay a decent subscription to a journal or newspaper if they offered incredibly high quality content ad-free. Instead what we have are cheap ad-saturated papers competing with each other to the lowest common denominator. It's a vicious cycle kicked off by Google and co.
    - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
      To get to be a 'journal or newspaper that offers incredibly high quality content ad-free' you need funding. Arguably you also need to go up against the richest and most powerful people in the World, and you need to protect against someone buying it and shutting it down. You need a lot of principles and some money, getting those things together in the same place seems hard. Was news in the past better ( more comprehensive? more verified?), or just better presented?
      - Avicebron 6y ago
        I'm of two minds on this and they aren't totally squared together, but I think they are both fair. 1. I'm somewhat nostalgic to physical newspapers for a couple of reasons, I think because they were physical and required a little bit more effort. They felt more authoritative and verifiable, that's the nostalgia. However I think there was another benefit to the journalists, because they were crafting a physical body of work, I probably naively believe it instilled a sense of duty in that work. Personally I feel like if my product (not code) was a fleeting piece of information, easily changeable and forgotten among a deluge of other work. I would not feel as obligated to honor the craft. So in short, less comprehensive and better verified and presented. 2. News was concentrated, I don't think this was necessarily a good thing. This is somewhat contradictory to 1. But I think this concentration was an easier to accept narrative and speaking to my above point, that presented a level of even-headedness to the whole affair of understanding the world and our place in it. The firehose that was unleashed with Google was good, but it then signaled the death of lots of rational measured thought and brought us to where we are today.
hysan 6y ago
Disagree in that they’ve already done plenty of damage. Easiest example is with RSS - entered the RSS Reader market for free and at a loss and effectively killed competition because you cannot compete with that. Then subsequently killed Google Reader. This chain of moves essentially drove RSS to being obsolete which in turn made everyone far more reliant on Google and social media. Now extend this to other products that they’ve started for free and subsequently killed. It’s not the same as embrace, extend, extinguish, but the result is the same. You kill off competition and stunt progress.
- beagle3 6y ago
  I don’t think RSS is a good example. Everyone I know who used google reader switched to a different RSS reader; It’s mostly that RSS isn’t monetizable as easily as web pages. I think FB and Twitter dropping their feeds had a more significant effect; regardless, RSS was always niche.
  - DoctorNick 6y ago
    Yeah, they all realized how much tracking and advert impressions you lose with RSS. It seems like that's happened with a lot of web technologies that aren't conducive to that since Google's taken the reins.
  - hysan 6y ago
    If we’re going to go with anecdotes, I can counter with all of my friends (entirely non-technical) simply stopped consuming via RSS because there were no alternatives at that time that ticked all the boxes. For me, the key is that Google Reader actually killed off competing products during its existence. Then when they killed of Google Reader, that stunted the ecosystem because anyone who wanted to provide an alternative was starting from the ground up. All the time that could have been spent driving RSS forward was instead spent on catchup. FB and Twitter dropping their feeds may not have happened if the RSS ecosystem evolved to benefit them in some way.
    - specialist 6y ago
Lammy 6y ago
> stalled the web with IE6 By inventing XMLHTTPRequest?

ajuc 6y ago

How evil you are is a function of how much power you have and for how long.

nabla9 6y ago

Google is becoming worse monopoly trough natural evolution of it's core business. It seems more offhand way. Network effects and economies of scale. Microsoft monopoly grew by planning and plotting. Bill Gates had genuinely sinister motivations and used deception and dirty play. To fix problems caused by Google, you need to change the principles of competition law. Microsoft was knowingly doing lots of stuff that violated laws. It was just very hard to prove it.

PaulStatezny 6y ago
Do you have any links to evidence of these statements about Microsoft? I'd be interested to read more.
- nabla9 6y ago
  It's kind of weird to get this question when you lived it and there seems to be relatively little to Google. I mean, it was all in the news, trade magazines, business journals. Blackmailing OEM's, intentionally breaking things and making them incompatible. At least the legal battles are documented somewhere and Wikipedia has something about them, but they were just the tip of the iceberg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars There must be book somewhere. Dan Gilmour's articles in San Jose Mercury news from 90's should be somewhere. Basically small software startups had to have Microsoft Strategy. They had to find way to stay out of Microsoft radar or MS would steal their work, their developers or block them. You sue them like Stack did and MS just stalls few years and pays few millions in damages. It was worth of losing in court to protect monopoly. Big OEM's like Dell had to do what MS said or MS would up their price. It was straight blackmail from monopoly position.
DoctorNick 6y ago
Yeah, that's the main reason that there isn't as much push back to the control that Google is starting to exert over all of us.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]