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If profits degrade for Google society will feel the impact pretty quickly. Think about how many schools rely on Google for Education for email, SSO, and Chromeb

by tmpz22 2y ago

If profits degrade for Google society will feel the impact pretty quickly. Think about how many schools rely on Google for Education for email, SSO, and Chromebooks. Think about people who rely on Google Maps, Sheets, Docs, and other loss-leading products. Think about all the data they scoop up in all their apps. Late game capitalism applied to Google's portfolio would be catastrophic.

tylerrobinson 2y ago
That bad, huh? I reckon everything you mentioned has a perfect substitute. What am I missing?
- sethjgore 2y ago
  I would think the sense of seamless integration contributes to the experience. Almost all third party software systems have integrations and plugins that make crossing over between Google suite and these near painless. Obviously this would be solved if we had a way to centralize our identity and file storage and such across platforms and systems. Yet at the moment the silo is what makes it seems painless and increases its value beyond the fact there’s a substitute to each platform and product.
- Arainach 2y ago
  Integration, management, accessibility, auditing and compliance for starters. Tech folks love to say "X is is perfect substitute for Y" in the same way they say "what's so hard about X, I could write that in a week" by considering only simple ideal workflows. The real value, and the real moat for these products, is that they're tied in with SSO and other products, easy for organizations small to huge to manage, have dozens or hundreds of specialized features crucial to large organizations. They comply with legal regulations, accessibility standards (which ARE legal regulations in many jurisdictions such as if you want to sell to the government), and more. Writing an email server is perhaps 2% of the work involved in building an email product.
jayrot 2y ago
Miss me with that “Too big to fail” nonsense.
mbrumlow 2y ago
I think about this a lot and feel like we are in a horrid position. All of our core service and software is locked up in a handful of companies. For humanity and the future of software’s sake we need to go back to users of software owning their software, preferably by being free and open source. It hurts me as somebody who wants to make money off software, but SaaS is just a bad deal for everybody. My compromise is in prim solutions.
- pestaa 2y ago
  SaaS is not a bad deal when users pay for the service directly. And Google have provided tremendous value with their free tools. People forget what it was like before Gmail and Docs. I sincerely hope we can move away from their business model, but looks to me consumers rather pay with anything but their money.
  - adamm255 2y ago
    So many people have never known any different. Gmail launched in 2004. Google Docs in 2006. So anyone who’s 18 today has never known a world without it. People don’t know what the save icon is in reality. Paying for things is interesting as media streaming is frequently valued by paying for it, collaboration and things like Google Maps not so much. I remember using a Palm Pilot with Tom Tom, and an old maps pack that didn’t have half the new main roads included in the UK! I’d honestly pay for Google Maps for the value I get from it.
    - jcgrillo 2y ago
      OTOH something you pay for is much safer and more reliable in multiple ways. I've been in "interesting" situations before with Google Maps, here's one scenario: You begin a trip with driving directions, but 2/3 of the way in your phone shuts off because you forgot to plug it in. When you get it going again you have no service. You open Google Maps and... nothing. Your directions are gone, and you can't load them again because you don't have network connectivity. I believe due to the restart this is even the case if Maps happens to give you the "download offline directions" option and you accept (which they don't always do). AFAICT there is no way to "reload" downloaded offline directions, only a search bar which does nothing without network connectivity. Google only really makes things that serve Google's interests, that's why they'll never fix this. If you, the user, put yourself in a situation where you depend on them, you're the sucker. Google has no incentive to actually make the product good for users, they just have to make it good enough that a sufficiently large number of users look at the advertisements in it. I'd much rather buy software and services from a company that has better aligned incentives. That's why I keep a paperback road atlas in my car.
t0mas88 2y ago
Email, SSO and Chromebooks all have competitors. And the Google offerings wouldn't disappear, they're profitable products that can be sold. They compete with Microsoft in that space.
shaky-carrousel 2y ago
Meh, they'll switch to Microsoft.
- kibwen 2y ago
  If Google gets broken up (which I'm rooting for, but not even remotely holding my breath for), then Microsoft is next on the chopping block.
  - rvz 2y ago
    Microsoft knows this how to 'avoid getting broken up but still continue our monopoly game' better than anyone else after escaping getting broken up in US v Microsoft Corp and other huge acquisitions. There needs to be a very strong case this time to go after Microsoft to argue for a break up of their business. Whoever is to bring the case (either the DOJ or the FTC), would have to go after Meta and Amazon first before targeting Microsoft. It won't be easy, but Microsoft has been able to avoid scrutiny for years.
  - thesuperbigfrog 2y ago
    >> If Google gets broken up, ... then Microsoft is next on the chopping block. Many regulatory agencies would target Microsoft next, but they have played this game and are willing to do whatever is needed to avoid extreme measures like forced break ups and sell offs.
forrestthewoods 2y ago
lol no. There already exists alternatives to every Google service. The only moat any of them have is that Google can give them away for free as a loss leader. There’s nothing special about Gmail in 2024. But Gmail is totally free which prevents anyone from investing in a significant competitor. Society will be just fine.
- mrkramer 2y ago
  >There already exists alternatives to every Google service. The only moat any of them have is that Google can give them away for free as a loss leader. The irony behind Google is that Google in the early days was the antonym for Yahoo; just a simple looking search engine with a search box, minimalistic UI and a better search ranking compared to Yahoo which was crammed internet portal which looked and felt messy. Nowadays Google still has minimalistic UI but lousy search and shit ton of web apps that try to capture as much attention as they can while sucking your data and doing God knows what with it. >There’s nothing special about Gmail in 2024. But Gmail is totally free which prevents anyone from investing in a significant competitor. Yea, Gmail is free and it somewhat feels OK to use so many people use it but I don't see how Gmail evolved substantially over the let's say last 10 years, there is still room for competition. And there are competitors, idk how "significant" they are but they do exist e.g. Proton Mail, Tuta, Fastmail, GMX Mail etc.
  - forrestthewoods 2y ago
    I personally pay for Hey email. But almost all people aren’t interested in paying for email when gmail is free.
  - fhdsgbbcaA 2y ago
    Hey now - any day now Gemini is going to pop off! It will read your email for you, reply, make major life decisions (eg respond to marriage proposals, banking transactions, etc), and much more - all in the inbox you know and love! If there’s one thing I know about Google under Sundar it’s that he’s a man of rare vision, foresight, and leadership. I’m sure things are going to go great!
gopkarthik 2y ago
> Late game capitalism applied to Google's portfolio would be catastrophic. This is probably my biggest fear about the eventual fate of Google. The amount of data they have is staggering and would be very short-term profitable for PE firms looking to make a quick buck.
- coryrc 2y ago
  How would they make more money off it than what Google is already doing?
  - viraptor 2y ago
    Google may not be a privacy champion, but they still have some rules. A PE company will do anything for more money if they're in the value extraction mode.
  - onion2k 2y ago
    By doing what Google is doing and also charging users to use services.
    - NAHWheatCracker 2y ago
      I honestly feel like that would be a good thing. It would push people towards alternatives and create competition. If Gmail had a $5/10/20 per month fee, I would probably migrate to a more privacy/security focused provider. I wouldn't pay much for YouTube, but video hosting is relatively easy and YouTube has degenerated so much that I'd like to watch content elsewhere. I would pay for Kagi and ChatGPT each twice before I would pay the same amount for Google Search. Good luck charging for Chrome and any of their developers tools. I know there's a million services by Google and I would probably demean most of them and I'm not near the typical consumer. However, if the typical consumer at least had to consider whether to pay, there would be so much breathing room in many industries. Something as large as Google trying to explicitly monetize all those services could also tremendously change consumer attitudes towards being willing to pay for things thus making more businesses viable that do less of the shitty stuff that Google does. For a bit, there would be some bad will as people notice extra bills. It sucks that those extra fees would disproportionately affect the poor. The most likely case would be something like Google Prime with a monthly $15 or yearly $140, which I don't think is a gross value proposition for an individual of even low means.
zelphirkalt 2y ago
We lived well without Google knowing everything we do, and I live well without almost any Google. I only have contact with Google on shitty-made websites, that for some reason I have to use. For everything Google does we have alternatives, and better ones than what Google is offering at that. So yes, society would quickly feel the positive impact of Google no longer being.
- IncreasePosts 2y ago
  Why isn't everyone using these better alternatives already?
  - viraptor 2y ago
    Inertia and lack of knowledge. Alternatives to Gmail are better in ways that must people don't understand and/or care about. And even if they do, the improvement may not be worth the effort. But, they're definitely good enough if people have to make a switch for some reason.
    - vrc 2y ago
      Cost too.
stavros 2y ago
You got the causality wrong. Profits would degrade because these services stop getting used, not the other way around.
viraptor 2y ago
I don't think it's going to be bad at all. These are not irreplaceable things and they're not even the best options. Email, SSO can be found from many providers, or self hosted. Docs/sheets have lots of online and offline alternatives. There's at least 4 large maps providers including OpenStreetMaps. I think there would be some pain for a few months as other companies deal with the user influx and then we'd get over it.
xboxnolifes 2y ago
If google suddenly disappeared, it would suck... for a year or two. Then everyone would have figured out how to operate, just like pre-google.
- AceFromOttawa 2y ago
  More like Microsoft would just swoop in and fill the void.
emrah 2y ago
There are many alternatives, some better than others. They would swoop in and fill the void. Sure, some things would take longer than others to replace and get up running but it's not like Google is the only provider of such services
Lammy 2y ago
“If the system breaks down the consequences will still be very painful. But the bigger the system grows the more disastrous the results of its breakdown will be, so if it is to break down it had best break down sooner rather than later.”
- cpeterso 2y ago
  From the Unabomber Manifesto: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/national/unabom-manifesto-1.html https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/national...
tacocataco 2y ago
Nationalize it and fold the services into the post office.
- kccqzy 2y ago
  And one of the main political parties here is dead set on strangling the post office's finances by requiring it to prefund retiree health benefits. It's a cash strapped organization that's barely hanging on. If the nationalization comes to fruition, you can count on them to strangle its finances until it's dying a slow death.
SirMaster 2y ago
Lots of people I know have been migrating away from these Google services though without much trouble. They are a lot more replaceable than most people think.
- Timwi 2y ago
  What's a good alternative to Google Docs and Sheets that has live collaborative editing?
tryauuum 2y ago
maps and email are solved technologies. Even I can deploy a great email service given time. The hard part is managing reputation of public ips and scanning outgoing mail for spam SSO is also solved. People will survive
datavirtue 2y ago
Rip the band-aid off.

by tmpz22 2y ago

tylerrobinson 2y ago

That bad, huh? I reckon everything you mentioned has a perfect substitute. What am I missing?

sethjgore 2y ago
I would think the sense of seamless integration contributes to the experience. Almost all third party software systems have integrations and plugins that make crossing over between Google suite and these near painless. Obviously this would be solved if we had a way to centralize our identity and file storage and such across platforms and systems. Yet at the moment the silo is what makes it seems painless and increases its value beyond the fact there’s a substitute to each platform and product.
Arainach 2y ago
Integration, management, accessibility, auditing and compliance for starters. Tech folks love to say "X is is perfect substitute for Y" in the same way they say "what's so hard about X, I could write that in a week" by considering only simple ideal workflows. The real value, and the real moat for these products, is that they're tied in with SSO and other products, easy for organizations small to huge to manage, have dozens or hundreds of specialized features crucial to large organizations. They comply with legal regulations, accessibility standards (which ARE legal regulations in many jurisdictions such as if you want to sell to the government), and more. Writing an email server is perhaps 2% of the work involved in building an email product.

jayrot 2y ago

Miss me with that “Too big to fail” nonsense.

mbrumlow 2y ago

I think about this a lot and feel like we are in a horrid position. All of our core service and software is locked up in a handful of companies. For humanity and the future of software’s sake we need to go back to users of software owning their software, preferably by being free and open source. It hurts me as somebody who wants to make money off software, but SaaS is just a bad deal for everybody. My compromise is in prim solutions.

pestaa 2y ago
SaaS is not a bad deal when users pay for the service directly. And Google have provided tremendous value with their free tools. People forget what it was like before Gmail and Docs. I sincerely hope we can move away from their business model, but looks to me consumers rather pay with anything but their money.
- adamm255 2y ago
  So many people have never known any different. Gmail launched in 2004. Google Docs in 2006. So anyone who’s 18 today has never known a world without it. People don’t know what the save icon is in reality. Paying for things is interesting as media streaming is frequently valued by paying for it, collaboration and things like Google Maps not so much. I remember using a Palm Pilot with Tom Tom, and an old maps pack that didn’t have half the new main roads included in the UK! I’d honestly pay for Google Maps for the value I get from it.
  - jcgrillo 2y ago
    OTOH something you pay for is much safer and more reliable in multiple ways. I've been in "interesting" situations before with Google Maps, here's one scenario: You begin a trip with driving directions, but 2/3 of the way in your phone shuts off because you forgot to plug it in. When you get it going again you have no service. You open Google Maps and... nothing. Your directions are gone, and you can't load them again because you don't have network connectivity. I believe due to the restart this is even the case if Maps happens to give you the "download offline directions" option and you accept (which they don't always do). AFAICT there is no way to "reload" downloaded offline directions, only a search bar which does nothing without network connectivity. Google only really makes things that serve Google's interests, that's why they'll never fix this. If you, the user, put yourself in a situation where you depend on them, you're the sucker. Google has no incentive to actually make the product good for users, they just have to make it good enough that a sufficiently large number of users look at the advertisements in it. I'd much rather buy software and services from a company that has better aligned incentives. That's why I keep a paperback road atlas in my car.

t0mas88 2y ago

Email, SSO and Chromebooks all have competitors. And the Google offerings wouldn't disappear, they're profitable products that can be sold. They compete with Microsoft in that space.

shaky-carrousel 2y ago

Meh, they'll switch to Microsoft.

kibwen 2y ago
If Google gets broken up (which I'm rooting for, but not even remotely holding my breath for), then Microsoft is next on the chopping block.
- rvz 2y ago
  Microsoft knows this how to 'avoid getting broken up but still continue our monopoly game' better than anyone else after escaping getting broken up in US v Microsoft Corp and other huge acquisitions. There needs to be a very strong case this time to go after Microsoft to argue for a break up of their business. Whoever is to bring the case (either the DOJ or the FTC), would have to go after Meta and Amazon first before targeting Microsoft. It won't be easy, but Microsoft has been able to avoid scrutiny for years.
- thesuperbigfrog 2y ago
  >> If Google gets broken up, ... then Microsoft is next on the chopping block. Many regulatory agencies would target Microsoft next, but they have played this game and are willing to do whatever is needed to avoid extreme measures like forced break ups and sell offs.

forrestthewoods 2y ago

lol no. There already exists alternatives to every Google service. The only moat any of them have is that Google can give them away for free as a loss leader. There’s nothing special about Gmail in 2024. But Gmail is totally free which prevents anyone from investing in a significant competitor. Society will be just fine.

mrkramer 2y ago
>There already exists alternatives to every Google service. The only moat any of them have is that Google can give them away for free as a loss leader. The irony behind Google is that Google in the early days was the antonym for Yahoo; just a simple looking search engine with a search box, minimalistic UI and a better search ranking compared to Yahoo which was crammed internet portal which looked and felt messy. Nowadays Google still has minimalistic UI but lousy search and shit ton of web apps that try to capture as much attention as they can while sucking your data and doing God knows what with it. >There’s nothing special about Gmail in 2024. But Gmail is totally free which prevents anyone from investing in a significant competitor. Yea, Gmail is free and it somewhat feels OK to use so many people use it but I don't see how Gmail evolved substantially over the let's say last 10 years, there is still room for competition. And there are competitors, idk how "significant" they are but they do exist e.g. Proton Mail, Tuta, Fastmail, GMX Mail etc.
- forrestthewoods 2y ago
  I personally pay for Hey email. But almost all people aren’t interested in paying for email when gmail is free.
- fhdsgbbcaA 2y ago
  Hey now - any day now Gemini is going to pop off! It will read your email for you, reply, make major life decisions (eg respond to marriage proposals, banking transactions, etc), and much more - all in the inbox you know and love! If there’s one thing I know about Google under Sundar it’s that he’s a man of rare vision, foresight, and leadership. I’m sure things are going to go great!

gopkarthik 2y ago

> Late game capitalism applied to Google's portfolio would be catastrophic. This is probably my biggest fear about the eventual fate of Google. The amount of data they have is staggering and would be very short-term profitable for PE firms looking to make a quick buck.

coryrc 2y ago
How would they make more money off it than what Google is already doing?
- viraptor 2y ago
  Google may not be a privacy champion, but they still have some rules. A PE company will do anything for more money if they're in the value extraction mode.
- onion2k 2y ago
  By doing what Google is doing and also charging users to use services.
  - NAHWheatCracker 2y ago
    I honestly feel like that would be a good thing. It would push people towards alternatives and create competition. If Gmail had a $5/10/20 per month fee, I would probably migrate to a more privacy/security focused provider. I wouldn't pay much for YouTube, but video hosting is relatively easy and YouTube has degenerated so much that I'd like to watch content elsewhere. I would pay for Kagi and ChatGPT each twice before I would pay the same amount for Google Search. Good luck charging for Chrome and any of their developers tools. I know there's a million services by Google and I would probably demean most of them and I'm not near the typical consumer. However, if the typical consumer at least had to consider whether to pay, there would be so much breathing room in many industries. Something as large as Google trying to explicitly monetize all those services could also tremendously change consumer attitudes towards being willing to pay for things thus making more businesses viable that do less of the shitty stuff that Google does. For a bit, there would be some bad will as people notice extra bills. It sucks that those extra fees would disproportionately affect the poor. The most likely case would be something like Google Prime with a monthly $15 or yearly $140, which I don't think is a gross value proposition for an individual of even low means.

zelphirkalt 2y ago

We lived well without Google knowing everything we do, and I live well without almost any Google. I only have contact with Google on shitty-made websites, that for some reason I have to use. For everything Google does we have alternatives, and better ones than what Google is offering at that. So yes, society would quickly feel the positive impact of Google no longer being.

IncreasePosts 2y ago
Why isn't everyone using these better alternatives already?
- viraptor 2y ago
  Inertia and lack of knowledge. Alternatives to Gmail are better in ways that must people don't understand and/or care about. And even if they do, the improvement may not be worth the effort. But, they're definitely good enough if people have to make a switch for some reason.
  - vrc 2y ago
    Cost too.

stavros 2y ago

You got the causality wrong. Profits would degrade because these services stop getting used, not the other way around.

viraptor 2y ago

I don't think it's going to be bad at all. These are not irreplaceable things and they're not even the best options. Email, SSO can be found from many providers, or self hosted. Docs/sheets have lots of online and offline alternatives. There's at least 4 large maps providers including OpenStreetMaps. I think there would be some pain for a few months as other companies deal with the user influx and then we'd get over it.

xboxnolifes 2y ago

If google suddenly disappeared, it would suck... for a year or two. Then everyone would have figured out how to operate, just like pre-google.

AceFromOttawa 2y ago
More like Microsoft would just swoop in and fill the void.

emrah 2y ago

There are many alternatives, some better than others. They would swoop in and fill the void. Sure, some things would take longer than others to replace and get up running but it's not like Google is the only provider of such services

Lammy 2y ago

“If the system breaks down the consequences will still be very painful. But the bigger the system grows the more disastrous the results of its breakdown will be, so if it is to break down it had best break down sooner rather than later.”

cpeterso 2y ago
From the Unabomber Manifesto: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/national/unabom-manifesto-1.html https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/national...

tacocataco 2y ago

Nationalize it and fold the services into the post office.

kccqzy 2y ago
And one of the main political parties here is dead set on strangling the post office's finances by requiring it to prefund retiree health benefits. It's a cash strapped organization that's barely hanging on. If the nationalization comes to fruition, you can count on them to strangle its finances until it's dying a slow death.

SirMaster 2y ago

Lots of people I know have been migrating away from these Google services though without much trouble. They are a lot more replaceable than most people think.

Timwi 2y ago
What's a good alternative to Google Docs and Sheets that has live collaborative editing?

tryauuum 2y ago

maps and email are solved technologies. Even I can deploy a great email service given time. The hard part is managing reputation of public ips and scanning outgoing mail for spam SSO is also solved. People will survive

datavirtue 2y ago

Rip the band-aid off.