4 ms·

> Gmail, Maps, Google Now, Hangouts, YouTube, and the Play Store This isn't actually a very strong moat. (Non Waze) alternatives to maps are becoming increas

> Gmail, Maps, Google Now, Hangouts, YouTube, and the Play Store This isn't actually a very strong moat. (Non Waze) alternatives to maps are becoming increasingly credible. Google Now and Hangouts are history. An alternate client to Gmail is easy, since it speaks imap, and the Android app isn't particularly amazing by itself. Youtube's possibly the toughest nut, but there are alternate clients to it, the web UI works very well in mobile browsers, and besides many would be satisfied with just having TikTok.

passwordoops 3y ago
>This isn't actually a very strong moat. That's true for the likes of you and me, but for the other 97% of the population, not so much. Most people just go for the default or are completely unaware of alternatives or don't trust alternatives
- smallerfish 3y ago
  For now, sure. But imagine Samsung putting $10B into the branding effort.
jacquesm 3y ago
This is actually a very strong moat. Note that there is some precedent for this: Windows and Office. Those are just as strong and they've kept MS in business for the last 40 years modulo some non-competitive behavior and strong arming 'partners' in exactly the same way that Google does. Take that power away and suddenly you can have some actual competition. That of course would take a number of legal systems (laws, judges, governments) to hold the line. I'm not very optimistic about that.
- DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
  Speaking for myself, as a silo’d SWE, but I’m starting to get the impression that MS Office (especially *.docx) is irrelevant today (excepting *.xlsx), outside of K-12 homework, at least. I wouldn’t say it’s competition that’s involved, but that the state of the entire industry is such that all of the functionality present in winword.exe is now the minimum-viable-product in any information-system. Or rather: anything you can do in Word, is now achievable in HTML; and given that no-one has a real need to print Word documents on paper, so it’s an ephemeral product that exists as a transition from paper-to-digital, living on borrowed time. In conclusion, I see myself downgrading my personal Office 365 subscription from Professional Plus to just Excel in my next renewal.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    A perfect illustration of my point, thank you.
nextaccountic 3y ago
> there are alternate clients to it They are increasingly being killed off by Google in their march to outlaw adblockers in the Internet
- danaris 3y ago
  But Google ultimately won't be able to entirely get around the basic problem of DRM: How do you give people something (so they can watch it), without giving it to them (so they can copy it)? The more they try to prevent people from accessing YouTube without seeing their ads, the closer they come to the line of "actually, don't let people see the content they're here to see".
fmajid 3y ago
There are Chinese phones that don't have any of these. In China, smartphones are basically a mostly invisible and easily replaced hardware layer under the everything app, QQ (WeChat). Outside China, however, that's a non-starter. Furthermore, many apps like online banking will refuse to work on phones that don't pass Google's Android Attestation, which is also part of the take-it-all-or-leave-it package. If you want to see how hard this is, just check out the forums for GrapheneOS (a secure thus degoogled fork of Android for Pixel phones).

passwordoops 3y ago

>This isn't actually a very strong moat. That's true for the likes of you and me, but for the other 97% of the population, not so much. Most people just go for the default or are completely unaware of alternatives or don't trust alternatives

smallerfish 3y ago
For now, sure. But imagine Samsung putting $10B into the branding effort.

jacquesm 3y ago

This is actually a very strong moat. Note that there is some precedent for this: Windows and Office. Those are just as strong and they've kept MS in business for the last 40 years modulo some non-competitive behavior and strong arming 'partners' in exactly the same way that Google does. Take that power away and suddenly you can have some actual competition. That of course would take a number of legal systems (laws, judges, governments) to hold the line. I'm not very optimistic about that.

DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
Speaking for myself, as a silo’d SWE, but I’m starting to get the impression that MS Office (especially *.docx) is irrelevant today (excepting *.xlsx), outside of K-12 homework, at least. I wouldn’t say it’s competition that’s involved, but that the state of the entire industry is such that all of the functionality present in winword.exe is now the minimum-viable-product in any information-system. Or rather: anything you can do in Word, is now achievable in HTML; and given that no-one has a real need to print Word documents on paper, so it’s an ephemeral product that exists as a transition from paper-to-digital, living on borrowed time. In conclusion, I see myself downgrading my personal Office 365 subscription from Professional Plus to just Excel in my next renewal.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  A perfect illustration of my point, thank you.

nextaccountic 3y ago

> there are alternate clients to it They are increasingly being killed off by Google in their march to outlaw adblockers in the Internet

danaris 3y ago
But Google ultimately won't be able to entirely get around the basic problem of DRM: How do you give people something (so they can watch it), without giving it to them (so they can copy it)? The more they try to prevent people from accessing YouTube without seeing their ads, the closer they come to the line of "actually, don't let people see the content they're here to see".

fmajid 3y ago

There are Chinese phones that don't have any of these. In China, smartphones are basically a mostly invisible and easily replaced hardware layer under the everything app, QQ (WeChat). Outside China, however, that's a non-starter. Furthermore, many apps like online banking will refuse to work on phones that don't pass Google's Android Attestation, which is also part of the take-it-all-or-leave-it package. If you want to see how hard this is, just check out the forums for GrapheneOS (a secure thus degoogled fork of Android for Pixel phones).