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Though I do not like monopolies, how did Google reach this position? Is there any kind of abuse going on? Or it is just a better product? I say so because I th

Though I do not like monopolies, how did Google reach this position? Is there any kind of abuse going on? Or it is just a better product? I say so because I think there should be alternatives, but suing just for being better does not make any sense to me, if that is the case, of course.

jfk13 5y ago
> how did Google reach this position? In part, at least, by relentlessly promoting Chrome on their (hugely popular) web properties, as well as other advertising channels. Was it legitimate for them to use their dominance of online search to aggressively push their web browser? I'm no expert, but some people may think that was improper.
- germandiago 5y ago
  I think there are two different things here being discussed. > In part, at least, by relentlessly promoting Chrome on their (hugely popular) web properties, as well as other advertising channels. It is their property, of course they can use it to promote their stuff. The other topic is how much they are doing without user consent. That would definitely could incur in privacy violations. But promoting my stuff in my own places? That is not a reason to complain.
  - skinkestek 5y ago
    >It is their property, of course they can use it to promote their stuff. Luckily for consumers and small and medium-sized businesses Microsoft vs Eu and Microsoft vs US tells a different story about the legality of using a monopoly in one area to push for monopoly in other areas. I'd not invest significant shares of my money into either MS or Google before we see the end of this, then maybe there is a chance to pick up some at a more realistic price. As the saying goes: the wheels of justice grinds slowly.
    - germandiago 5y ago
      You as a consumer have the power of where to put your money. If you think a company is creating monopolies just use an alternative. If you keep using the one from the big company, you should wonder why as well. Maybe they are offering something better than the alternatives and I do not think someone should be entitled to force all the other consumers have inferior or more expensive products because a third party decides that they are too big. By this reasoning, what you are saying is that we have to stop companies making better products for the people on the basis that they are too big. The dynamics of competition tells us that when IBM existed, it appeared Microsoft, when Microsoft and IBM existed, it appeared Google, Apple came back, Facebook appeared. If big companies had absolute power then this would not happen. More companies will be born, the same way Zara was born in Spain from a guy sewing at his own home. Telling someone that because they are "too big" they cannot make better products makes no sense to me, since you just said you support consumers. Me too, that is why I won't force inferior products on them. The reasons should be something else like agreeing prices among companies or similar stuff. But even that could make some small company emerge if the prices are artificially puffed up, because it makes them less competitive. It is a business chance for someone else in that case.
      - skinkestek 5y ago
        > If you think a company is creating monopolies just use an alternative. I do. I've used Firefox as my main browser since well over a decade ago. > If you keep using the one from the big company, you should wonder why as well. Again, I never use it. I tried it back when it was new but it wasn't that much faster and the extensions were subpar. Later the reasons expanded as K didn't want to deal with Google. > Maybe they are offering something better than the alternatives and I do not think someone should be entitled to force all the other consumers have inferior or more expensive products because a third party decides that they are too big. If this was all then they should probably go free even if no one liked them. I think I am fair enough to judge them that way. However they, like Microsoft before (and after) them use their monopoly in one space to chase monopolies in other space. > By this reasoning, what you are saying is that we have to stop companies making better products for the people on the basis that they are too big. Not at all what I am saying.
MagnumOpus 5y ago
> Is there any kind of abuse going on There is several kinds of abuse going on: - antitrust abuse, in that Google is cross-subsidising spending billions of dollars per year on a free browser, pulled from revenues from their dominant market position on search advertising (and then setting the default search engine to re-inforce that dominant search position) - dark patterns where Google both sneakily installs Chrome with lots of other programs even if the user doesn't want it, as well as popping up banners on Google properties that suggests that your computer doesn't run properly without Chrome (yes MS does it too, and no that doesn't make it right) - repeated so-called "bugs" where Google 'engineers' slow down Youtube or Gmail massively on rival browsers by exploiting minor differences in Javascript interpretation for plausible deniability
- 2Gkashmiri 5y ago
  why is sign in to chrome a thing? i have been using firefox for the past 12-15 years exclusively now and i am starting to see coworkers all "signed into their browser". why? before anyone says syncing, no one uses that. i guarantee that. people either now use "office work" and mobile phone. they do not mix together and no one wants to stay in touch with office notifications from browser. i do understand this is a thing for some people but why expose EVERYONE to a feature whose only purpose is to collect data on specific people and their browsing habits, bookmarks, passwords, favorites,
  - tstrimple 5y ago
    You're thoroughly incorrect in your assumptions about how people use browsers.
    - 2Gkashmiri 5y ago
      arent you assuming everyone will have more than 1 computing device, laptop or desktop or tablet that they want to work on at all times? how many people are those compared to who only have any one of these devices only? who will they sync to ? their phones? why?
ygra 5y ago
Google may just have more resources to throw at the problem. And not to forget, a few of the most-viewed pages on the internet, each of which will show you a popup suggesting that you switch to the browser that Google's sites are really made for.
cptskippy 5y ago
> Though I do not like monopolies, how did Google reach this position? Someone has probably written a book on this. There were a lot of factors that lead to Google gaining dominance. Some of the highlights: 1 - Microsoft let IE6 languish after capturing the market. This was strategic because they felt the Web threatened their dominance on the desktop. 2 - Mozilla attacked IE6 by promoting standards compliance and worked to clearly document web standards and compliance. 3 - Mozilla attacked IE6 by launching Firefox (formerly Phoenix) and focusing standards compliance. 4 - Apple introduced a platform (iPhone) that was rapidly adopted and incompatible with IE6, necessitating change 5 - Google saw Mozilla Firefox clawing back 25% market share from IE6 6 - Google leveraged the browser engine in Safari (the iPhone browser) to launch their own browser with a focus on performance. 7 - Google put ads for Chrome on Google Search which basically put them in Firefox and on all platforms.
- cookie_monsta 5y ago
  All good points, but I think it's also important to remember that we felt very differently about Google when Chrome came out. On top of search, they'd given us gmail, maps and earth and a bunch of other stuff that was amazing at the time and free. There was a feeling that Google just "got it" when it came to the web, so a lot of people didn't need much convincing to try Chrome. It was a good browser, too- fast, (mostly) standards-compliant and it came with fully featured dev tools back when IE and FF didn't even ship with them. I don't like what Google has become, but it was a very different company back then.
- otherotherchris 5y ago
  8. Google produced a cleaner, faster browser than the buggy, slow and bloated Firefox. Mozilla began addressing performance issues with Firefox 57 and future releases, but for almost the entire decade prior Firefox was unstable trash.
  - cptskippy 5y ago
    > but for almost the entire decade prior Firefox was unstable trash. I don't think it was any more unstable than other browsers at the time, however they were the ones who introduced session restore to combat crashing. It's funny how a mitigation to crashing evolved into a must have feature. I've been using it since it was called Phoenix and trash is the last word I'd use to describe it.
DrBazza 5y ago
> Though I do not like monopolies, how did Google reach this position? Is there any kind of abuse going on? Or it is just a better product? tl;dr REST, competition, the shift to devices, and explosion in "web apps". The market for webapps in the 90s/00s was tiny compared to today. A brief history of web browsing from the 90s to now: NCSA Mosaic came along. It was alright. Then Netscape Navigator came along and it ended up a bloated mess. In the meantime, AOL appeared, and home computer users started connecting to the internet for the first time. Then IE6 became an awful entrenched thing, and it was "ok". It gave us XMLHttpRequest [1] which gave us REST, but apart from that, it was barely updated apart from security fixes because of 'reasons', not limited to: "part of the OS", enterprise paying customers encourage MS to make it stay the same otherwise breaking poorly written web apps. Search 'box model'. In the meantime, Firefox appeared and was progressing, but made little headway against IE. It was faster than NN, but not exceptionally so. Vista came along, then Windows 7, along with IE 7. And Apple with Safari. Finally, there's some competition - Firefox, Opera, Chrome, and IE. Things like JQuery, CSS Zen Garden appeared along with w3c compliance scoring, and finally IE started dropping market share. Legacy "this site works best in IE6" apps and sites started becoming irrelevant to most people other than enterprise companies. Newer sites and web apps started appearing and flipped it "we don't support IE any more", or in some cases showed a degraded site (IIRC there were ecommerce companies that actively charged you more if you surfed to their site using IE in the User-Agent string). Chrome in 2010 was a far faster, better browser than IE bundled with Windows. Chrome on Android, obviously now accounts for a huge percentage of online browsing. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest#History
- michaelhoffman 5y ago
  XMLHttpRequest led to the Ajax paradigm, not REST.
  - DrBazza 5y ago
    Yeah, that's what I meant. Long day... :D
    - 5y ago
Devasta 5y ago
Ads on the google search page and youtube help quite a bit, but once they became a large presence in the browser market it was just a case of relentlessly adding and changing features non stop, force your opponents to have to develop at a frantic pace just to keep pace with you.

jfk13 5y ago

> how did Google reach this position? In part, at least, by relentlessly promoting Chrome on their (hugely popular) web properties, as well as other advertising channels. Was it legitimate for them to use their dominance of online search to aggressively push their web browser? I'm no expert, but some people may think that was improper.

germandiago 5y ago
I think there are two different things here being discussed. > In part, at least, by relentlessly promoting Chrome on their (hugely popular) web properties, as well as other advertising channels. It is their property, of course they can use it to promote their stuff. The other topic is how much they are doing without user consent. That would definitely could incur in privacy violations. But promoting my stuff in my own places? That is not a reason to complain.
- skinkestek 5y ago
  >It is their property, of course they can use it to promote their stuff. Luckily for consumers and small and medium-sized businesses Microsoft vs Eu and Microsoft vs US tells a different story about the legality of using a monopoly in one area to push for monopoly in other areas. I'd not invest significant shares of my money into either MS or Google before we see the end of this, then maybe there is a chance to pick up some at a more realistic price. As the saying goes: the wheels of justice grinds slowly.
  - germandiago 5y ago
    You as a consumer have the power of where to put your money. If you think a company is creating monopolies just use an alternative. If you keep using the one from the big company, you should wonder why as well. Maybe they are offering something better than the alternatives and I do not think someone should be entitled to force all the other consumers have inferior or more expensive products because a third party decides that they are too big. By this reasoning, what you are saying is that we have to stop companies making better products for the people on the basis that they are too big. The dynamics of competition tells us that when IBM existed, it appeared Microsoft, when Microsoft and IBM existed, it appeared Google, Apple came back, Facebook appeared. If big companies had absolute power then this would not happen. More companies will be born, the same way Zara was born in Spain from a guy sewing at his own home. Telling someone that because they are "too big" they cannot make better products makes no sense to me, since you just said you support consumers. Me too, that is why I won't force inferior products on them. The reasons should be something else like agreeing prices among companies or similar stuff. But even that could make some small company emerge if the prices are artificially puffed up, because it makes them less competitive. It is a business chance for someone else in that case.
    - skinkestek 5y ago
      > If you think a company is creating monopolies just use an alternative. I do. I've used Firefox as my main browser since well over a decade ago. > If you keep using the one from the big company, you should wonder why as well. Again, I never use it. I tried it back when it was new but it wasn't that much faster and the extensions were subpar. Later the reasons expanded as K didn't want to deal with Google. > Maybe they are offering something better than the alternatives and I do not think someone should be entitled to force all the other consumers have inferior or more expensive products because a third party decides that they are too big. If this was all then they should probably go free even if no one liked them. I think I am fair enough to judge them that way. However they, like Microsoft before (and after) them use their monopoly in one space to chase monopolies in other space. > By this reasoning, what you are saying is that we have to stop companies making better products for the people on the basis that they are too big. Not at all what I am saying.

MagnumOpus 5y ago

> Is there any kind of abuse going on There is several kinds of abuse going on: - antitrust abuse, in that Google is cross-subsidising spending billions of dollars per year on a free browser, pulled from revenues from their dominant market position on search advertising (and then setting the default search engine to re-inforce that dominant search position) - dark patterns where Google both sneakily installs Chrome with lots of other programs even if the user doesn't want it, as well as popping up banners on Google properties that suggests that your computer doesn't run properly without Chrome (yes MS does it too, and no that doesn't make it right) - repeated so-called "bugs" where Google 'engineers' slow down Youtube or Gmail massively on rival browsers by exploiting minor differences in Javascript interpretation for plausible deniability

2Gkashmiri 5y ago
why is sign in to chrome a thing? i have been using firefox for the past 12-15 years exclusively now and i am starting to see coworkers all "signed into their browser". why? before anyone says syncing, no one uses that. i guarantee that. people either now use "office work" and mobile phone. they do not mix together and no one wants to stay in touch with office notifications from browser. i do understand this is a thing for some people but why expose EVERYONE to a feature whose only purpose is to collect data on specific people and their browsing habits, bookmarks, passwords, favorites,
- tstrimple 5y ago
  You're thoroughly incorrect in your assumptions about how people use browsers.
  - 2Gkashmiri 5y ago
    arent you assuming everyone will have more than 1 computing device, laptop or desktop or tablet that they want to work on at all times? how many people are those compared to who only have any one of these devices only? who will they sync to ? their phones? why?

ygra 5y ago

Google may just have more resources to throw at the problem. And not to forget, a few of the most-viewed pages on the internet, each of which will show you a popup suggesting that you switch to the browser that Google's sites are really made for.

cptskippy 5y ago

> Though I do not like monopolies, how did Google reach this position? Someone has probably written a book on this. There were a lot of factors that lead to Google gaining dominance. Some of the highlights: 1 - Microsoft let IE6 languish after capturing the market. This was strategic because they felt the Web threatened their dominance on the desktop. 2 - Mozilla attacked IE6 by promoting standards compliance and worked to clearly document web standards and compliance. 3 - Mozilla attacked IE6 by launching Firefox (formerly Phoenix) and focusing standards compliance. 4 - Apple introduced a platform (iPhone) that was rapidly adopted and incompatible with IE6, necessitating change 5 - Google saw Mozilla Firefox clawing back 25% market share from IE6 6 - Google leveraged the browser engine in Safari (the iPhone browser) to launch their own browser with a focus on performance. 7 - Google put ads for Chrome on Google Search which basically put them in Firefox and on all platforms.

cookie_monsta 5y ago
All good points, but I think it's also important to remember that we felt very differently about Google when Chrome came out. On top of search, they'd given us gmail, maps and earth and a bunch of other stuff that was amazing at the time and free. There was a feeling that Google just "got it" when it came to the web, so a lot of people didn't need much convincing to try Chrome. It was a good browser, too- fast, (mostly) standards-compliant and it came with fully featured dev tools back when IE and FF didn't even ship with them. I don't like what Google has become, but it was a very different company back then.
otherotherchris 5y ago
8. Google produced a cleaner, faster browser than the buggy, slow and bloated Firefox. Mozilla began addressing performance issues with Firefox 57 and future releases, but for almost the entire decade prior Firefox was unstable trash.
- cptskippy 5y ago
  > but for almost the entire decade prior Firefox was unstable trash. I don't think it was any more unstable than other browsers at the time, however they were the ones who introduced session restore to combat crashing. It's funny how a mitigation to crashing evolved into a must have feature. I've been using it since it was called Phoenix and trash is the last word I'd use to describe it.

DrBazza 5y ago

> Though I do not like monopolies, how did Google reach this position? Is there any kind of abuse going on? Or it is just a better product? tl;dr REST, competition, the shift to devices, and explosion in "web apps". The market for webapps in the 90s/00s was tiny compared to today. A brief history of web browsing from the 90s to now: NCSA Mosaic came along. It was alright. Then Netscape Navigator came along and it ended up a bloated mess. In the meantime, AOL appeared, and home computer users started connecting to the internet for the first time. Then IE6 became an awful entrenched thing, and it was "ok". It gave us XMLHttpRequest [1] which gave us REST, but apart from that, it was barely updated apart from security fixes because of 'reasons', not limited to: "part of the OS", enterprise paying customers encourage MS to make it stay the same otherwise breaking poorly written web apps. Search 'box model'. In the meantime, Firefox appeared and was progressing, but made little headway against IE. It was faster than NN, but not exceptionally so. Vista came along, then Windows 7, along with IE 7. And Apple with Safari. Finally, there's some competition - Firefox, Opera, Chrome, and IE. Things like JQuery, CSS Zen Garden appeared along with w3c compliance scoring, and finally IE started dropping market share. Legacy "this site works best in IE6" apps and sites started becoming irrelevant to most people other than enterprise companies. Newer sites and web apps started appearing and flipped it "we don't support IE any more", or in some cases showed a degraded site (IIRC there were ecommerce companies that actively charged you more if you surfed to their site using IE in the User-Agent string). Chrome in 2010 was a far faster, better browser than IE bundled with Windows. Chrome on Android, obviously now accounts for a huge percentage of online browsing. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest#History

michaelhoffman 5y ago
XMLHttpRequest led to the Ajax paradigm, not REST.
- DrBazza 5y ago
  Yeah, that's what I meant. Long day... :D
  - 5y ago

Devasta 5y ago

Ads on the google search page and youtube help quite a bit, but once they became a large presence in the browser market it was just a case of relentlessly adding and changing features non stop, force your opponents to have to develop at a frantic pace just to keep pace with you.