I know of scary few products by Google (or one of the other tech bigcos) that successfully wiped out an up-and-coming startup.
They did acquire quite a bunch, but can you name a successful Google product that killed a startup without acquiring it? I'm sure there are some but it can't be much. Docs, Android, Firebase, Maps all came out of acquisitions.
I mean, sure, they're super competitive, but my impression is that that competitiveness is mostly targeted at Amazon/AWS, Microsoft, Facebook, etc. I mean GCP is mostly just Google reimplementing the most popular AWS products with less cruft. That's super competitive but I'm curious how it threatens your one man business.
I've seen this before as "Think long-term, not short-term". Sometimes it can be true.
That’s why people tell you to “be yourself”. It’s a rough proxy for “don’t be other people” which is a rough proxy for “don’t be something someone else is already succeeding at.”
But also, if you are really enamored of Google, maybe that means you should work towards getting hired there!
(I'm a self-funded entrepreneur)
I know I personally highly value the ability to talk to an actual human if I’m having a problem.
But if big IT has learned their lesson they won't wait until you're too big to run you over. It's why everyone is on acquisition sprees these days, or simply incorporate tech and ideas into their products and use their sheer market share to drown smaller competitors they borrowed the idea from.
A niche may be different since no company can cover everything. But it's still uncertain when they choose to go there and go head to head with you. Google didn't overtake MS by playing in a niche. So I guess it depends on what your targets are.
This means that you could be the best in your field for hundreds of miles around, but your neighbors might still go on Amazon and order a product manufactured in China.
I worry about this.
Find or invent a tiny niche and be among the best in the world in it, and the whole world (including China) will come to you for it.
they certainly do aggressively shutdown the products.
> I probably should just merge into Google one day and stop my worrying?
Every second you are worrying about what Google is doing rather than continuing to work on whatever you are working on is the second you are wasting.
Most monopolies have been government granted - railroads through free land, AT&T by creation, etc.
It used it's massive, over 90% share of the market (and it's vertical supply chain) to deter competition, and made deals with other suppliers to make the inertia of competing a herculean task
But the price did not go up.
Standard Oil owned 90%+ of the oil refineries in the US (they never did drill for oil) yet that wasn't why Standard Oil was broken up. They were broken up because they were using their influence with oil to control the train industry, specifically, train transport of oil. [1]
Microsoft wasn't threatened with breakup over their operating system monopoly on desktop computers, but because they were using that influence with at attempt to control the web browser industry.
[1] And ironically, it was the breakup of Standard Oil that made John. D. Rockefeller the richest man in the world. He was also responsible for saving the world's population of whales. [2]
[2] Half-serious here. Whale oil was big business, until Rockefeller made petroleum products cheap enough to supplant whale oil as a product.
Google is undercutting everyone in the mobile OS market. What once was a varied market died completely because nobody could compete with Android's "it's free if you agree to preload a bunch of Google apps" (iOS isn't really on the market since its Apple exclusive, LG can only reasonably choose Android). Google makes all that lost income back because this creates a monopoly for the Play Store, and massively helps other Google services.
Not really textbook examples, but that's because the textbook example of selling at a loss to kill all competition and then raise prices is illegal in most cases
>This Note argues that the current framework in antitrust—specifically its pegging competition to “consumer welfare,” defined as short-term price effects—is unequipped to capture the architecture of market power in the modern economy. We cannot cognize the potential harms to competition posed by Amazon’s dominance if we measure competition primarily through price and output. Specifically, current doctrine underappreciates the risk of predatory pricing and how integration across distinct business lines may prove anticompetitive. These concerns are heightened in the context of online platforms for two reasons. First, the economics of platform markets create incentives for a company to pursue growth over profits, a strategy that investors have rewarded. Under these conditions, predatory pricing becomes highly rational—even as existing doctrine treats it as irrational and therefore implausible. Second, because online platforms serve as critical intermediaries, integrating across business lines positions these platforms to control the essential infrastructure on which their rivals depend. This dual role also enables a platform to exploit information collected on companies using its services to undermine them as competitors.
This is also the same approach that Uber is using - charge artificially low prices for rides to undercut other cab companies, and eventually deploy self-driving cars and increase their prices.
Which is what I'm saying - people claim it happens, but it never has. It's near impossible to corner a market without the government granting the monopoly.
- Google Search/Ads and Google Cloud are money makers. They are constantly improved, handled with care and have prices comparable to the competition, maybe slightly lower
- Chrome is costing massive amounts of money. Between the massive development effort and the big worldwide marketing campaigns Google must have spent billions on Chrome in a play to protect their other services and dictate web standards. Android also belongs in this category, dictating a massive portion of the mobile market
- GMail/GSuite, Youtube, Google Home etc probably about break even. Like the previous category they are strategic plays aimed at controlling a market, and they are great for the brand. But since their markets are less valuable they are the step children
- lastly we have the experiments. Google has cut most of them, and you are probably better off not using them at all
I consider Google to be one of the giants that are entirely irrelevant in competitive terms. They almost comically stay in their lane: search, YouTube, search, Gmail, search, search, ads, search, Android, search, search, Google Cloud, search. Every ten years or so maybe they'll add something.
I consider Google to be a company that never has to be considered when I'm thinking about building something.
I have no plans to launch my own massive operating system (what small team is going to do that anyway). I have no interest in doing a common search engine. Competing in the streaming space with YouTube, Netflix, & Co. is a nightmare of licensing & rights problems (and it's very saturated). The last thing I'd ever want to do is run an email service (thankful for those that do it well). AWS, Azure, and 37 other cloud service providers already exist, no need to reinvent that wheel and compete with Google Cloud (they're not the most competitive there anyway).
Google search is 21 years old. Gmail is 15 years old. YouTube is 14-15 years old. Android is 11 years old. Google is gray.
So what else is there? That just leaves 99% of everything else that I never, ever have to worry about Google competing seriously in.
Google is the first company that started to spend money on productionize self driving technology. It takes time to get to market, because the problem is super hard.
If you want something newer that probably won't go away any time soon, Tensorflow is a few years old, and TPUs are also just a few years old. Google has many of the best and biggest number of AI researchers, and it's not shy to use the AI infrastructure in production.