7 ms·

This list is very telling. Instead of a healthy marketplace of companies competing to sell their software and services, we end up with one monopolist who gives

by fsh 1y ago

This list is very telling. Instead of a healthy marketplace of companies competing to sell their software and services, we end up with one monopolist who gives away mediocre products and in return taxes everything you buy (in the form of ad spending), and then annoys you with the same ads. How is this a desirable outcome?

sofixa 1y ago
Because the vast majority of people don't want to and have zero intention pf paying separately for email, maps, navigation, browser, etc. In fact, that's how things used to be before Google and their ilk used ads to make an ecosystem, and their ecosystem was better and free at the point of use than what came before
- fsh 1y ago
  The vast majority of people are paying separately for all kinds of stuff. I don't see a reason why software and digital services have to be different. In the early days, payment was difficult, but this has been long solved. I am convinced that the quality would improve dramatically if there was some actual competition. Also most people would probably prefer not to pay for the ad fees that google extorts from pretty much any company.
  - ikiris 1y ago
    With the exception of fi, If you think any of those services are something people want to pay yet another saas subscription for, you’ve been hitting your own supply too much.
  - tokioyoyo 1y ago
    Everyone would be subscribed to YT premium, if people were ok with paying for ad-free experience.
    - jorvi 1y ago
      Honestly, I feel like people are subconsciously aware that Google is trying to bludgeon them into getting YouTube premium, and they're simply sticking it to Google rather than giving in. Google's gone through: - one skippable 5s ad - two skippable 5s ads - one unskippable 5s and one skippable 15s ads - aforementioned or two 15s ads, one skippable - two 15s unskippable ads - removed the prerenderer 'skip' button to make it more difficult to immediately skip - removed the ad amount indicator and precise length indicator (now just a bar) to psychologically drive people into sunk cost feelings God knows what they're cooking up next. And for large swathes of content, there is no alternative to YouTube.
      - quitit 1y ago
        Those changes seem more like boiling the frog because the content they're looking for is only available on YT. I'm a firm believer in the issue being one of pricing, not that the consumer is willing to pay nothing at all. I have this view because we've already seen how users flocked to iTunes, then Spotify/Apple Music and Netflix/other streaming services when the pricing was right. We are also now watching as people depart streaming services and return to direct sales and P2P file-sharing due to incrementally higher prices. To me that's a sure indicator of price being the problem, not an insatiable appetite for zero cost. The math largely makes sense too. Particularly in music if you're the type that has a taste for a genre of music, rather than just wanting to listen to the top 40.
        pesus 1y ago
        I agree price is the issue. I'm a YouTube premium subscriber myself since I use it so much, but every friend I've talked to about it bar one has been put off by the price. Lowering the price and possibly splitting YouTube Music into its own subscription would make a big difference - I have no interest in YouTube music as I already have another music streaming subscription I'm not interested in giving up.
      - Workaccount2 1y ago
        Everytime someone blocks an ad, someone else has to watch it. It's crazy to me how entitled people are and how completely blind they are to how the ad supported model works. Then these same people complain that youtube has no competitors. Yeah, no shit, who in their right mind would invest in a customer base like youtubes? Oh, that's right, Vid.me, and they went bankrupt in a year. Wonder why...
  - benlivengood 1y ago
    > I am convinced that the quality would improve dramatically if there was some actual competition. You can pay for Google One right now, roughly exchanging cash for storage capacity on the otherwise free services. I see no viable competition for that model. Protonmail is comparatively expensive. I really don't want the Internet to turn into the mess that is video streaming where every independent licensing agency tries to capture an audience for $15/month. Another great example is Let's Encrypt. It's a public good to provide quality TLS certificates and the marginal cost is $0 with some sponsorship. I'd far rather other core Internet services like e-mail and basic file sharing are sponsored.
  - sofixa 1y ago
    > The vast majority of people are paying separately for all kinds of stuff. And a lot of them already suffer from subscription fatigue.
- dreghgh 1y ago
  But if Google weren't a monopoly, phone manufacturers could choose to bundle different collections of apps made by different people on to their hardware, rather than having to get it all from Google. This would also mean that phone users could be given a genuine choice about their privacy, rather than have dark patterns to force them to give up most of it, because it's the Android business model.
- asadotzler 1y ago
  Our expectations and intentions aren't some magical gift from god, they're simply the stuff we're used to, and Google got us used to ad-based everything when before many of us did pay for things like our blogging platform, our domain names and even our email and other hosting services.
FridayoLeary 1y ago
There is nothing mediocre about the search engine, gmail, maps, android, chrome etc.. etc. Do they all have room for for improvement? Probably. But they are simply incredibly, breathtakingly good products. Search, maybe has gotten worse in recent years, but it's still amazing. Maps and Satelleite view are astounding, especially when you consider that they are free. >How is this a desirable outcome? The list speaks for itself. There are many valid complaints against google, but this is not one of them.
- danielheath 1y ago
  Having used alternatives to a few of their products… I’ll accept part of that list. Gmail is well below mediocre, it’s so sluggish and unresponsive even on fast hardware. Compare with fastmail; it’s hard to go back. The search engine consistently gives me pages of blog spam before a useful result. Eg Kagi is dramatically more useful despite having a tiny fraction of the resources to work with.
  - inquirerGeneral 1y ago
    [dead]
- lolc 1y ago
  > There is nothing mediocre about the search engine I agree. The search index is great, the presentation is shitty. As for maps: The most prominent features on it are ads. The rest is low contrast. For navigation the map is really bad. The satellite view is great. Yeah not mediocre: It's great tech enshittified.
  - standyro 1y ago
    The iPod has less space than a Nomad. Lame.
    - kergonath 1y ago
      The most infuriating is that Google Maps used to be much better. But yeah, it’s crap.
echelon 1y ago
We need a better word than "duopoly" to describe what Apple and Google are. They're just as bad as a monopoly - and they're impossible to compete with. Both Apple and Google need to be disrupted here. We should be able to see lots of healthy verticals for every single one of these product categories. They shouldn't accrue to two players and be impossible to dislodge. I propose the word "Googolith" to describe {Google, Apple, Amazon}, though it's not a great attempt. We do need some kind of word or language to describe these anti-competitive titans that are impossible to innovate against. The word "monopoly" gets shut down, but the control they wield may as well be monopolistic. There's no choice and there's no competing. They're practically nation states.
- cwmoore 1y ago
  Paretarchy?
- callc 1y ago
  Chaebol?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- Workaccount2 1y ago
  Google works because of it's ad network and tracking. Everything Google does is a money furnace without a centralized ad network. People may celebrate the break-up of google, but it will be short lived when they find that now everything they do on the internet that they used to do through google costs a monthly sub. Or is ad supported with zero tolerance for ad-blocking. The reason competing with google is impossible is because people are deathly allergic to paying for things that they think are free. Vid.me sucked all the air out of the room for a few months in 2017 and was pulling tons of yotubers over. Then it went bankrupt because "People don't like subscriptions, people don't like ads."
  - starfezzy 1y ago
    > People may celebrate the break-up of google, but it will be short lived You know what will be short lived? The disruption itself. We're not talking about the death of Sol. The most significant fact in all of this is that everything will stabilize and we'll all be fine (except the monopoly, which is the point). And when it's all said and done, we'll come out the other side better for it.
dvdhnt 1y ago
This is a very ungrateful and childish perspective. It assumes that these things exist out of thin air rather than things google has created. Products don’t just appear, they’re built. Nothing is stopping someone from usurping google. Ever hear of oracle, intel, xerox, blackberry or Microsoft?
- dangrossman 1y ago
  Almost all the things in this list were acquired from someone else that built them, rebranded, and then given away for free, taking much of the money out of the market that allowed that product to be built. Without Google giving away the one winner they chose to acquire, you'd have options again. I built my free web stats service in 2004 because I couldn't afford an Urchin license. Google bought Urchin Live and rebranded it as Google Analytics, and gave it away for free. My service barely pays for itself 20+ years later, but I'm still here and would have an offering for that market on day one that Google Analytics shut down. So would dozens of others.
  - jader201 1y ago
    > Almost all the things in this list were acquired from someone else that built them, rebranded, and then given away for free Nearly everything that was acquired was a) already free, and b) built (and given away for free) in hopes that someone like Google would acquire them. If you look at most startups, their exit strategy is acquisition. Some would live to IPO, but that is a much tougher road. It could be argued that IPO is a less likely exit strategy because of Google’s and others’ position, but I think it’s disingenuous to imply that startups (that are already giving away their products for free) are getting acquired as a last resort. Most CEOs plan and hope for it.
    - no_wizard 1y ago
      > Most CEOs plan and hope for it I don’t think so, at least, it’s not their main motivation. For most, I imagine the VC fueled free period is to lock up customers and increase you have their sensitive data, you start making moves so you can start to charge them, usually a fairly hefty sum. It’s a classic lock in strategy.
TechDebtDevin 1y ago
What are you talking about, there are competitors for all these products, they simply just aren't as good...
- doctorpangloss 1y ago
  Not just bad. There isn't a single piece of Apple software that is (1) free and (2) people choose to use on iOS, only use because the user is forced to. Photos? Forced, sucks. iMessage? Forced, sucks. Apple Mail, Calendar, Contacts? Huge pieces of shit. The App Store, the very gateway into competition, is the shittiest of all, and not just because the 30% fee, but because its discovery is maybe the worst ever made by any catalog-style front end in the world. At least they opened up the password completion APIs.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - TechDebtDevin 1y ago
    Yeah, I really don't understand how MS, Google and AT&T get this treatment but not Apple..
    - int_19h 1y ago
      Mostly because they don't have 90+% market share in anything.
  - pnathan 1y ago
    Apple user software is legitimately awful in a systematic way. Although I like the Chess app. :) Google, interestingly, is much better. I don't know what to say. It's clear that the Internet Ecosystem has a megafauna of Google and taking it out would be an ecosystem collapse, but the other Megafauna are... worse.
  - Shank 1y ago
    It’s pretty myopic to say that people don’t choose to use Apple software. Not only do many people choose to use the Apple software that comes with their devices, they buy those devices for it.
actinium226 1y ago
I agree. I'm so sick of maps. I type something in and there it is, can't they do any better than that? Sure they have directions to the place in multiple modalities, and photos of it, and reviews, but is that it? Is that really the best that's available? Google drive is likewise awful. I upload something to it and there it is. I come back 10 years later and it's still there. Why doesn't it do more? Why can't it make my file better over time? Why can't they take ideas from dropbox, or box, or onedrive. Stupid monopoly forcing us all into one choice. And as for Google Fiber, well there are so many ISPs offering gigabit plans now, what is Fiber going to offer to do better? It's like you said we need a healthy marketplace with competing companies, not just the one monopolist with shitty gigabit ethernet service. And don't even get me started on gmail!
- bcraven 1y ago
  My apologies but I can't work out if your Google Drive example is some deep satire that's going over my head. What functionality are you expecting?
  - Terr_ 1y ago
    I think it's sarcasm, rather than the frustration of a utopianist, but it's unreasonably hard to tell.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- yellow_postit 1y ago
  I know this is satire but Maps is increasingly worse. More ads. Less useful POIs. They actually stood still long enough for Apple Maps to catch up.
  - actinium226 1y ago
    Yes, satire aside there's room for improvement in these services. Maps frequently has incorrect business hours.
scarface_74 1y ago
The list is mostly BS. Android doesn’t even have a majority market share in any of those services except for Search related services. And even if Gmail does have a majority of the market, there are plenty of other email providers.

by fsh 1y ago

sofixa 1y ago

Because the vast majority of people don't want to and have zero intention pf paying separately for email, maps, navigation, browser, etc. In fact, that's how things used to be before Google and their ilk used ads to make an ecosystem, and their ecosystem was better and free at the point of use than what came before

fsh 1y ago
The vast majority of people are paying separately for all kinds of stuff. I don't see a reason why software and digital services have to be different. In the early days, payment was difficult, but this has been long solved. I am convinced that the quality would improve dramatically if there was some actual competition. Also most people would probably prefer not to pay for the ad fees that google extorts from pretty much any company.
- ikiris 1y ago
  With the exception of fi, If you think any of those services are something people want to pay yet another saas subscription for, you’ve been hitting your own supply too much.
- tokioyoyo 1y ago
  Everyone would be subscribed to YT premium, if people were ok with paying for ad-free experience.
  - jorvi 1y ago
    Honestly, I feel like people are subconsciously aware that Google is trying to bludgeon them into getting YouTube premium, and they're simply sticking it to Google rather than giving in. Google's gone through: - one skippable 5s ad - two skippable 5s ads - one unskippable 5s and one skippable 15s ads - aforementioned or two 15s ads, one skippable - two 15s unskippable ads - removed the prerenderer 'skip' button to make it more difficult to immediately skip - removed the ad amount indicator and precise length indicator (now just a bar) to psychologically drive people into sunk cost feelings God knows what they're cooking up next. And for large swathes of content, there is no alternative to YouTube.
    - quitit 1y ago
      Those changes seem more like boiling the frog because the content they're looking for is only available on YT. I'm a firm believer in the issue being one of pricing, not that the consumer is willing to pay nothing at all. I have this view because we've already seen how users flocked to iTunes, then Spotify/Apple Music and Netflix/other streaming services when the pricing was right. We are also now watching as people depart streaming services and return to direct sales and P2P file-sharing due to incrementally higher prices. To me that's a sure indicator of price being the problem, not an insatiable appetite for zero cost. The math largely makes sense too. Particularly in music if you're the type that has a taste for a genre of music, rather than just wanting to listen to the top 40.
      - pesus 1y ago
        I agree price is the issue. I'm a YouTube premium subscriber myself since I use it so much, but every friend I've talked to about it bar one has been put off by the price. Lowering the price and possibly splitting YouTube Music into its own subscription would make a big difference - I have no interest in YouTube music as I already have another music streaming subscription I'm not interested in giving up.
    - Workaccount2 1y ago
      Everytime someone blocks an ad, someone else has to watch it. It's crazy to me how entitled people are and how completely blind they are to how the ad supported model works. Then these same people complain that youtube has no competitors. Yeah, no shit, who in their right mind would invest in a customer base like youtubes? Oh, that's right, Vid.me, and they went bankrupt in a year. Wonder why...
- benlivengood 1y ago
  > I am convinced that the quality would improve dramatically if there was some actual competition. You can pay for Google One right now, roughly exchanging cash for storage capacity on the otherwise free services. I see no viable competition for that model. Protonmail is comparatively expensive. I really don't want the Internet to turn into the mess that is video streaming where every independent licensing agency tries to capture an audience for $15/month. Another great example is Let's Encrypt. It's a public good to provide quality TLS certificates and the marginal cost is $0 with some sponsorship. I'd far rather other core Internet services like e-mail and basic file sharing are sponsored.
- sofixa 1y ago
  > The vast majority of people are paying separately for all kinds of stuff. And a lot of them already suffer from subscription fatigue.
dreghgh 1y ago
But if Google weren't a monopoly, phone manufacturers could choose to bundle different collections of apps made by different people on to their hardware, rather than having to get it all from Google. This would also mean that phone users could be given a genuine choice about their privacy, rather than have dark patterns to force them to give up most of it, because it's the Android business model.
asadotzler 1y ago
Our expectations and intentions aren't some magical gift from god, they're simply the stuff we're used to, and Google got us used to ad-based everything when before many of us did pay for things like our blogging platform, our domain names and even our email and other hosting services.

FridayoLeary 1y ago

There is nothing mediocre about the search engine, gmail, maps, android, chrome etc.. etc. Do they all have room for for improvement? Probably. But they are simply incredibly, breathtakingly good products. Search, maybe has gotten worse in recent years, but it's still amazing. Maps and Satelleite view are astounding, especially when you consider that they are free. >How is this a desirable outcome? The list speaks for itself. There are many valid complaints against google, but this is not one of them.

danielheath 1y ago
Having used alternatives to a few of their products… I’ll accept part of that list. Gmail is well below mediocre, it’s so sluggish and unresponsive even on fast hardware. Compare with fastmail; it’s hard to go back. The search engine consistently gives me pages of blog spam before a useful result. Eg Kagi is dramatically more useful despite having a tiny fraction of the resources to work with.
- inquirerGeneral 1y ago
  [dead]
lolc 1y ago
> There is nothing mediocre about the search engine I agree. The search index is great, the presentation is shitty. As for maps: The most prominent features on it are ads. The rest is low contrast. For navigation the map is really bad. The satellite view is great. Yeah not mediocre: It's great tech enshittified.
- standyro 1y ago
  The iPod has less space than a Nomad. Lame.
  - kergonath 1y ago
    The most infuriating is that Google Maps used to be much better. But yeah, it’s crap.

echelon 1y ago

We need a better word than "duopoly" to describe what Apple and Google are. They're just as bad as a monopoly - and they're impossible to compete with. Both Apple and Google need to be disrupted here. We should be able to see lots of healthy verticals for every single one of these product categories. They shouldn't accrue to two players and be impossible to dislodge. I propose the word "Googolith" to describe {Google, Apple, Amazon}, though it's not a great attempt. We do need some kind of word or language to describe these anti-competitive titans that are impossible to innovate against. The word "monopoly" gets shut down, but the control they wield may as well be monopolistic. There's no choice and there's no competing. They're practically nation states.

cwmoore 1y ago
Paretarchy?
callc 1y ago
Chaebol?
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Workaccount2 1y ago
Google works because of it's ad network and tracking. Everything Google does is a money furnace without a centralized ad network. People may celebrate the break-up of google, but it will be short lived when they find that now everything they do on the internet that they used to do through google costs a monthly sub. Or is ad supported with zero tolerance for ad-blocking. The reason competing with google is impossible is because people are deathly allergic to paying for things that they think are free. Vid.me sucked all the air out of the room for a few months in 2017 and was pulling tons of yotubers over. Then it went bankrupt because "People don't like subscriptions, people don't like ads."
- starfezzy 1y ago
  > People may celebrate the break-up of google, but it will be short lived You know what will be short lived? The disruption itself. We're not talking about the death of Sol. The most significant fact in all of this is that everything will stabilize and we'll all be fine (except the monopoly, which is the point). And when it's all said and done, we'll come out the other side better for it.

dvdhnt 1y ago

This is a very ungrateful and childish perspective. It assumes that these things exist out of thin air rather than things google has created. Products don’t just appear, they’re built. Nothing is stopping someone from usurping google. Ever hear of oracle, intel, xerox, blackberry or Microsoft?

dangrossman 1y ago
Almost all the things in this list were acquired from someone else that built them, rebranded, and then given away for free, taking much of the money out of the market that allowed that product to be built. Without Google giving away the one winner they chose to acquire, you'd have options again. I built my free web stats service in 2004 because I couldn't afford an Urchin license. Google bought Urchin Live and rebranded it as Google Analytics, and gave it away for free. My service barely pays for itself 20+ years later, but I'm still here and would have an offering for that market on day one that Google Analytics shut down. So would dozens of others.
- jader201 1y ago
  > Almost all the things in this list were acquired from someone else that built them, rebranded, and then given away for free Nearly everything that was acquired was a) already free, and b) built (and given away for free) in hopes that someone like Google would acquire them. If you look at most startups, their exit strategy is acquisition. Some would live to IPO, but that is a much tougher road. It could be argued that IPO is a less likely exit strategy because of Google’s and others’ position, but I think it’s disingenuous to imply that startups (that are already giving away their products for free) are getting acquired as a last resort. Most CEOs plan and hope for it.
  - no_wizard 1y ago
    > Most CEOs plan and hope for it I don’t think so, at least, it’s not their main motivation. For most, I imagine the VC fueled free period is to lock up customers and increase you have their sensitive data, you start making moves so you can start to charge them, usually a fairly hefty sum. It’s a classic lock in strategy.

TechDebtDevin 1y ago

What are you talking about, there are competitors for all these products, they simply just aren't as good...

doctorpangloss 1y ago
Not just bad. There isn't a single piece of Apple software that is (1) free and (2) people choose to use on iOS, only use because the user is forced to. Photos? Forced, sucks. iMessage? Forced, sucks. Apple Mail, Calendar, Contacts? Huge pieces of shit. The App Store, the very gateway into competition, is the shittiest of all, and not just because the 30% fee, but because its discovery is maybe the worst ever made by any catalog-style front end in the world. At least they opened up the password completion APIs.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- TechDebtDevin 1y ago
  Yeah, I really don't understand how MS, Google and AT&T get this treatment but not Apple..
  - int_19h 1y ago
    Mostly because they don't have 90+% market share in anything.
- pnathan 1y ago
  Apple user software is legitimately awful in a systematic way. Although I like the Chess app. :) Google, interestingly, is much better. I don't know what to say. It's clear that the Internet Ecosystem has a megafauna of Google and taking it out would be an ecosystem collapse, but the other Megafauna are... worse.
- Shank 1y ago
  It’s pretty myopic to say that people don’t choose to use Apple software. Not only do many people choose to use the Apple software that comes with their devices, they buy those devices for it.

actinium226 1y ago

I agree. I'm so sick of maps. I type something in and there it is, can't they do any better than that? Sure they have directions to the place in multiple modalities, and photos of it, and reviews, but is that it? Is that really the best that's available? Google drive is likewise awful. I upload something to it and there it is. I come back 10 years later and it's still there. Why doesn't it do more? Why can't it make my file better over time? Why can't they take ideas from dropbox, or box, or onedrive. Stupid monopoly forcing us all into one choice. And as for Google Fiber, well there are so many ISPs offering gigabit plans now, what is Fiber going to offer to do better? It's like you said we need a healthy marketplace with competing companies, not just the one monopolist with shitty gigabit ethernet service. And don't even get me started on gmail!

bcraven 1y ago
My apologies but I can't work out if your Google Drive example is some deep satire that's going over my head. What functionality are you expecting?
- Terr_ 1y ago
  I think it's sarcasm, rather than the frustration of a utopianist, but it's unreasonably hard to tell.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
yellow_postit 1y ago
I know this is satire but Maps is increasingly worse. More ads. Less useful POIs. They actually stood still long enough for Apple Maps to catch up.
- actinium226 1y ago
  Yes, satire aside there's room for improvement in these services. Maps frequently has incorrect business hours.

scarface_74 1y ago

The list is mostly BS. Android doesn’t even have a majority market share in any of those services except for Search related services. And even if Gmail does have a majority of the market, there are plenty of other email providers.