Probably the most disruptive thing if Apple vanished would actually be every tech company suddenly needing to figure out how to use Windows or desktop Linux.
Additionally, think of all of the Google-backed services out there provided by other companies. How many companies use gmail heavily that would lose all kinds of records?
Normal people would lose their e-mail too, and businessmen would lose a lot of their calendars. The actual solution doesn't matter as much as the data already invested in Google's solutions that would be lost if Google just vanished.
The biggest loss to humanity (in my opinion) would be all the translation data they hold privately. But Google really just people and money. If Google the entity disappeared tomorrow all those people who still know how to do the work will just start working on it elsewhere and catch up quickly.
My bad. I was thinking about what would happen if Google disappeared as in, one day their servers and services just aren't available for whatever reason, rather than a staged transition/fade out.
20 years ago, nobody could have pictured living without AOL, they had search, the directory, email, Aim - and connectivity.
15 years ago, few people could have seen a world without Yahoo.
3 months ago Dorsey said Twitter is an essential part of the internet.
There's arguments for backups, etc but in reality if the common business person working at these companies sits down and none of their Google products work, their day will halt.
Edit: to clarify, my source[1] said 5 million orgs with 50 million individual users. Not counting Gmail obviously
User Interface. Dropbox presented a beautifully clean metaphor for how your files get synced. It doesn't matter if you understand what "the cloud" is. My grandmother understands: "put things in folder, folder available elsewhere".
On the other hand we've got Google Drive. Is GMail using Google drive? Is Google Photos using Google Drive? Why don't folders other people have shared to me not appear in my folder? Why isn't 'Shared with Me' the same as "Mine". Is Google Drive the same thing as Google Docs?
Not to mention - Dropbox really pushed the "Desktop App", while Google Drive pushed the "Web First" approach. Add on referral bonuses, Dropbox had some good solid adoption - well, at least among free users.
I use both extensively - Dropbox Pro for everything personal, and Google Drive for everything at work, and I still get confused about the where I saved/shared files to in Google Drive.
What do you mean?
Drive sync works fine like Dropbox, at least on Windows and Mac.
That source is pretty old and cites an even older source (it looks like it may be from Google I/O 2012). Searching for "Google Apps has 50 million users" actually gives articles from last year saying they have 50 million education users alone, so I'd say the number is a pretty extreme lowshot now.
But more importantly, why would you compare Google Apps and iCloud? The closer thing would be Android backup and iCloud, maybe?
"In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we primarily source from Yahoo!, and in some regions and scenarios, Yandex and Bing.
On the other hand, there were a few Chinese people there, and most of them seemed to have a non-halted life.
I agree that Google vanishing in an instant would have a more tangible short-term effect than Apple doing the same. But I feel you paint them as (nearly) opposite ends of a spectrum. Google provides many centralized services that people have come to depend on, whereas Apple creates physical products that would continue to function even if the company ceased to be. But Apple provides some similar centralized services and its various stores that sell virtual products (apps, music, video).
Either disappearing would be inconvenient for a lot of people—notably those who use centralized services—but my opinion is that in both cases, people would adapt fairly quickly.
All that said, as someone who doesn't use services or products provided by either of these two companies, my instinct is to agree with you that Google feels like it provides greater net value to society than Apple.
Wait, what was your point?
No company is as dominant in any of those areas as Google is in its area, or they probably would be. Water and electricity are often public utilities; while there are big food companies, there's no parallel to Google; there are a number of major oil companies, but no one single dominant one -- but those of the many in the top tier that are publicly traded are valued highly (from tens of billions to hundreds of billions), and several are not public so that no public valuation exists.
If Google were abducted by space aliens I'd immediately start an online ad exchange supported by a ubiquitous cookie. If Apple were likewise abducted I'd fork Android and hire a good industrial designer and try to eat Samsung's lunch before they come to their senses.
Neither company makes anything the average user can't live without, and neither company has a monopoly on stuff that excites nerds like us. Both are very very good at some things, sure, but let's not pretend the world really needs them per se.
Ok, cheap shot, but seriously though, without these companies flagship products the world would be a poorer place. Even their competitors products would be significantly poorer. But it's not so much the present that would suffer from the loss of these companies as it is the future.
What am I missing? I don't know all the ins and outs of Google.
I don't use any Google services, personally.
https://developers.google.com/apis-explorer/
There's a lot of services that depend on Google and changing all that code overnight is unlikely. Apple doesn't have that kind of 3rd party reach.
Google might (unlikely, but remotely possible) get split up by antitrust action, but it won't disappear through it, the same way AT&T didn't.