One could make the argument that making the push from the OS is a different level than from the website.
When people leave Google Search (and they will, nothing lasts forever), they'll leave fast.
Further, because of mobile, there are significantly greater number of Google users than there are Windows users.
I guess I am annoyed because as someone who uses Firefox as their primary browser, it always frustrated me that there was t more outrage at Google pushing people away from Firefox. But the moment MS started doing it, it became an outrage.
Accounts would be the hard part because that's my phone login, and there's no standard account service I could migrate to that would give me a functional replacement.
The real thing keeping me on the Google platform is the convenience of having these things tied together. But that's not exactly a strong lock for me. I can and do hop services while sacrificing convenience. This might be a stronger hold on others but it's still not Microsoft's you-can't-do-work-in-any-organization level of hold between Office, Windows, Exchange, etc..
* This has actually been annoying for me lately. The results favor the things I've already clicked on which is often exactly not what I'm after.
1) You use Firefox, and Microsoft tells you that you should use IE instead. 2) You use Google Search, and Google tells you that you should use Google Search more often.
The first is similar to Google somehow placing notes in Bing Search that Google search is better, the second is similar to Microsoft telling IE users that IE is better than Firefox in [this metric].
I think 1) is ethically more questionable than 2).
Actually when you use google search, google tells you that you should use Chrome. The exact popup says:
Google works better with Chrome
Yes, get Chrome nowIf I login with Firefox, no such banner (I think because it would cause an uproar within the dev comunity).
The psychological burden of having to mentally validate my choice of browser every time I used Google was a factor made me switch away from Google, so maybe they've stoppped doing it now?
I am not suggesting that this current action violates the terms of Microsoft's settlement, only that there's relevant historical context here.
To be clear, I think both companies' whining is tacky and annoying.
And while Google bundles it's browser, like Microsoft did, it also bundles almost twenty applications now, which in most cases cannot be removed by the user.
So, yeah, twenty years ago, Microsoft did some bad things, but Google is doing much worse right now.
I agree that Google has not had a court find them an abusive monopolist, but I would add "yet." As someone who watched the Microsoft case start out in the tech press, then move to the mainstream press, and then finally become indictments the similarity to the process with Google is pretty interesting. If you follow the dollars, you can see how much money Google is paying for search traffic which squeezes out organic growth of competitors and were it not for Microsoft's warchest of cash probably would have killed off Bing before it became operationally profitable. And they use that search engine dominance to push the browser of their design which favors their products? That feels very much like Microsoft using their dominance in the OS space to push their browser which favored their products and technologies.