This is a perfect summation of how people feel about Google and Amazon, or Sears in the 1920s and Kodak in the 1960s. And it's a perfect reminder that monopolies are much more fleeting than people realize.
I think the reason they seem bigger is because the economy is bigger, and so in dollar and output terms they are bigger. But that also means there are more niches and greater complexity, and it becomes harder to sustain a monopoly against multiple competitive threats over time. While the playbook of monopoly managers has expanded since 1900, the number of adversaries they face has expanded faster.
This is a great comment to put things in perspective. It’s easy to forget that Google has only had “dominance” for about a decade. They have diversified quite a lot though (autonomous vehicles, the mobile market etc). And Apple literally have enough cash stockpiled to takeover countries if they choose to wage war. It’s all pretty fleeting though.
Additionally, it's important to remember that all of the largest american oil companies today are descendants of standard oil, and I imagine such could very well be likely if any of these other big monopolies were broken up today when it comes to the internet.
The Facebook/CA scandal broke in traditional media, and traditional media hasn't exactly been downplaying the possibility of Facebook-powered "fake news" influencing of elections, either. I think that tells you everything you need to know about the purported monopolisation of the media by Facebook.
Seems realistic to me, when capitalism stops working as envisaged by its own founder, because the mechanism of the state gets bought out by the capitalists, and isn't enforcing anti-trust laws or competition.
Google is probably the closest to a modern day monopoly in many (but not all) markets. The competitors like DDG, Bing and Yahoo make up such a small percentage of the market share that Google has become the de-facto standard for search, unless you're in places like China and Russia.
I'm using the term loosely too, because technically a Monopoly is when only a single supplier exists on the market. Typically monopolies start out as government agencies (AT&T, Telstra, TelecomNZ .. telecos are great examples of this btw) but the rest are really relative monopolies. There are other suppliers, but they pale in market percentage (Microsoft was declared a monopoly by many EU courts even when people were still using macos).
Monopolies are good as long as they can be gone in the flip of a hat if people decide so.
Sic transit gloria mundi!
No company is really competing with Google on search. There's DuckDuckGo and all that, which is a nice idea, but their results are just nowhere near as good as Google's in most cases.
I don't agree with that assessment. Occasionally I'll need to stick a !g at the front of my search, but usually DDG does a good enough job with the results (and when it fails, Google usually fails, too).
since i’ve gone back to using google as primary i’ve found the results are better.
anyway you are both speaking anecdotally but arguing as if you speak for the general case. at the risk of making the same mistake, i bet that in the general case google is better.
Either way, seems like betting on a general case is a shaky proposition given the difficulty of defining a "general" case for a search engine.
Or IBM.
-Microsoft's old motto. This is exactly how they previously did business and still do, frankly.
Facebook's core business functions purely on user data though and that's how they use the rest of their businesses to make money. If traditional Facebook dies their other businesses won't be far behind without significant change that doesn't disrupt revenue.
If Facebook learns to listen to their customers the way Microsoft has (as opposed to trying to tell them what they want) then they could recover. But with Facebook, users are starting to have large issues with its core business model, and to listen to customers and adopt the changes they want, it would cost them too much and would eventually disappear as so many others have before them.
Really? They still have corporate desktops and cheap skanky laptops (for some reason), but azure is not a challange to AWS, they aren't in the media business, the home market is being chipped away, where are they doing better now then they were 12 months ago?
Since 12 months ago profits have doubled, shares are up 19%, revenue is up 13%, cloud revenue is up 11%, cash reserves are up, oh, and PC-related revenue is down a whopping 2%.
Actually the latest quarter shows cloud revenue up 98% (I assume year-on-year), so Azure is doing pretty well.
https://www.computerworlduk.com/it-vendors/is-microsoft-azur...