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Alphabet is at a $2T market cap, and its core products like Gmail, Google Analytics, and the search engine are garbage at this point.

• shadowgovt 1y ago
  Gmail has 1.8 billion active users. In what sense is it garbage, and relative to what? And if it's garbage, why haven't people switched yet? I hear good things about Proton Mail; it has about 100 million users. Why aren't people leaving Gmail in droves to switch to it?
  • ZeroTalent 1y ago
    Why are people using Microsoft's products? Why are people using Windows?
    • shadowgovt 1y ago
      Because it works extremely reliably for a vast swathe of users. (When I was younger, I wondered the same thing. An older relative who used to own a grocery store shared his vantage point with me. Before Windows came along, things were fragmented and complex, and that made it hard for him to do his job: manage grocery inventory, sell to customers, and track the money. IBM, Microsoft, and their ilk brought to the space something that was hard to build before: integrated solutions where there was one mostly-right answer for most problems and, most importantly, you didn't have to hunt it down because it was right in front of you. This is huge for people who want their nine-to-five to be something other than "the computer itself." Because we hackers love having our nine-to-five be "the computer itself," I think we sometimes lose sight of how few decisions people outside our ecosystem want to be making. They just want it to work. They want to pay someone to make it work. And there's a lot of money to be made in being the companies that do that.)