Google’s dominance under siege: Antitrust trial threatens sweeping changes
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In fact everything has just consolidated over last few decades. Now we ended up with handful of people owning everything and rigging markets all over the place.
What we need to focus on is how to create decentralized open source free(libre) software, networks, hardware and platform alternatives for what FANNGs are offering.
The CPU is a slave to special interest groups, liberating the CPU from beaucracy and market forces, is only a matter of time.
Electronics has been shielded from proper conceptual innovation, by social forces intent on using the system to control the globe.
The conceptual freedom in Eve online is a better model for the internet, than SimCity.
That's one of the biggest arguments for a breakup and factually correct. Historically antitrust action has unlocked value. The point of any good antitrust policy isn't to destroy value, but to increase competition. If the broken up companies in the aggregate are worth more your policy has succeeded. Some companies like Alibaba or JD have actually started to spinoff segments themselves due to investor pressure.
the open source free software utopia is a pipe dream in the foreseeable future, but more importantly, if it wasn't that's not an argument against improving market conditions. Open source developers benefit from competition like everyone else. It arguably increases the need for interoperable, open software.
My impression of anti trust laws was that they are meant to benefit the end customers, isn’t it the case?
But here's the thing about competition:
If there is one monopoly, it can simply return all profit to shareholders and ignore the customer
If that is split into 5 businesses, then consumers must choose. Whichever company consumers don't choose will do poorly and their investors will suffer. Whichever company does will will do well and their shareholders will be rewarded.
So how does the game play out? They compete. They make a case to you why you should choose them. They introduce new products with differentiated features that will win the market. They undercut the competition and accept a smaller profit (or even a loss) in exchange for marketshare. They compete for your business.
At the end of the day, the increased profit might go to shareholders, but the rest of competition (reduced prices, new and better products, etc) go to the customer.
A single employer for sure depresses wages.
For alibaba I thought it was because the ccp thought they were getting too big/powerful?
edit:
Seems like the "official" reason is that it'll make the company better overall, but everyone thinks it's really because of pressure from the ccp.
>Now a split is happening, though not at the behest of Beijing—at least not directly. On March 28th Alibaba announced that it would be creating six independent business units. Executives say this will yield a more agile overall business, by speeding up decision-making across smaller and more focused operations. The main unspoken goal may be to decentralise decision-making, not least by disassociating Alibaba further from its founder, who stepped away from day-to-day management in 2015 but has remained involved in strategic decisions.
https://www.economist.com/business/2023/03/30/alibaba-breaks...
Isn't the break up of monopolies supposed to benefit the consumer as well by lowering prices, which most economists argue that it did?
IF if the owners made more money, and the consumers saved money, I would say that is a great argument for breaking up Google as well.
I would bet the better part of competition is not a reduction in price but a prevention of stagnation. Imo, the huge stagnation in USA's internet is purely a lack of competition. When Google Fiber showed up all of the sudden encombents could offer 10x the speeds.
If horse shoe owners somehow were vertically integrated and controlled iron in the US; I have no doubt they would've squashed the automotive industry.
“These laws prohibit anticompetitive conduct and mergers that deprive American consumers, taxpayers, and workers of the benefits of competition”
The goal is to benefit consumers, taxpayers and workers, the mechanism is using competition
>“These laws prohibit anticompetitive conduct and mergers that deprive American consumers, taxpayers, and workers of the benefits of competition”
> The goal is to benefit consumers, taxpayers and workers, the mechanism is using competition
Which part don't you understand.
1) In my second sentence I explicitly call out promoting competition is the goal of anti-trust
2) Parent was saying that anti-trust's goal was to lower prices.
RIP in peace Apple and Linux
Microsoft also kept the main pro software suite running on Apple's garbage OS and then ported it to Mac OS X, just to try to stave off the antitrust proceedings, further helping Apple claw its way back.
Microsoft and Adobe basically saved Mac OS and Apple, allowing Apple to bounce back a few years later.
Microsoft invested a whopping $250 million in Apple. Apple already had secured a $4 billion line of credit and didn’t become profitable until losing billions more. The $250 wouldn’t have saved Apple.
Also, Apple turned around the next quarter and bought PowerComputings Mac assets for $100 million.
And Office was not charity project for MS, it made a hefty profit. Also it was much easier to convince corporate buyers to buy Office if they could use on Office Suite across their entire organization - even for those hippie Mac users in the corner
Office for mac may have been profitable, but it may have been more profitable to not allow Mac to have it.
And how is it not trivial? Can you show me a timeline that Apple would have been bankrupt without the extra $250 million?
Also do you realize how much more MS made on an Office license than a Windows license?
If windows had not allowed office on Apple computers then Apple computers would have been less successful. Market share on hardware matters more than profits on software.
And yes market share on hardware is important, look how badly Apple is doing now with only 13% of the global market share in smart phones…
Apple’s hardware market share is huge when considering the wealth of customers. Apple makes most of its money by forbidding sharing access to its customers for software these days.
One reason that for example that Pepsi was spun off from Yum brands was that Pepsi executives had a hard time selling into large franchises because companies didn’t want to send money to competitors.
> Apple’s hardware market share is huge when considering the wealth of customers.
“Words mean things” - “market share” has a definition.
> Apple makes most of its money by forbidding sharing access to its customers for software these days
Are you just making stuff up now? It’s really not hard to look at Apple’s financials to see that “most” of Apple’s revenue comes from hardware sells and not services - where App Store revenue is included.
Market share does mean something specific, but you chose to specify which market, and that wasn’t the important one, so your definition was not useful.
Most of Apple’s revenue comes from the hardware sales. But the hardware sales are very expensive. Even at 110%+ markups. The App Store sales is by comparison basically free. The majority of Apple’s contribution margin is coming from sources like that. Which is doubly toxic because this is only due to Apple forbidding competition against itself on its hardware.
Assets = liabilities + owners equity
This formula is like high school finance.
When Microsoft bought $250 million in Apple Stock, the Assets increased by $250 million and the owners equity increased by $250 million.
This is simple double entry accounting.
When Google pays Apple and Microsoft to be the default search engine, you still add the payment to Assets and owners equity.
When you borrow money - say the same $250 million - you still add $250 million to Assets. But then you add $250 million to liabilities.
You notice that in all three scenarios that Assets increase ?
By that simple equation, “Assets” increase by three methods to “fund” the company - through the regular course of business, someone buying into the company and via debt.
Again this is simple Finance 101.
> Most of Apple’s revenue comes from the hardware sales. But the hardware sales are very expensive. Even at 110%+ markups. The App Store sales is by comparison basically free
Now check your math against the publicly available breakdown of revenue and the overall profit and see how nonsensical your math is.
> Market share does mean something specific, but you chose to specify which market, and that wasn’t the important one, so your definition was not useful.
So which market share are you making up to make your comment logical?
> Which is doubly toxic because this is only due to Apple forbidding competition against itself on its hardware.
Are you really saying that Apple has no competition in the phone market??
When Google pays a fee to other companies it becomes revenue. Revenue is a temporary account and does not feature in the balance sheet. Retained earnings does, which is revenue - expenses - distributions. This is all tangential to the point that the majority of funding for a company at any given time is likely debt and contributed capital. Apple is over 80% debt funded. Retained earnings accounts for less than 0.1% of Apple’s funding.
I have passed the CPA exam so consider if you really think you’ve got the upper hand here.
> Now check your math against the publicly available breakdown of revenue and the overall profit and see how nonsensical your math is.
Products sales: 61B. Products COGS: 39B. Gross Income of 22B
Services sales: 21B. Services COGS: 6B. Gross income of 15B.
Consider then that the vast majority of their supporting expenses including 7B in R&D go towards their product (which is the hardware and OS) and I think you’d find this easily supports what I’m saying. It’s closer than I thought though.
> So which market share are you making up to make your comment logical?
The most important one. The US.
> Are you really saying that Apple has no competition in the phone market??
No, you just didn’t read.
When Google pays Apple 18B to be the default search engine, it goes in two accounts. It’s recognized as revenue and it goes into owners equity. That revenue is then used to fund expenses. Just like when equity is injected into a company, it is used to fund continuing operations.
And the only reason that Apple has any debt is because in a zero% interest rate environment, it made more sense than to have to repatriate earnings.
Revenue is not owners equity. It is an income statement account. It eventually feeds into net income which can eventually flow into retained earnings, which is part of owners equity.
But nobody calls things a “revenue funded company”. There’s a huge difference between a 6% stake in equity and a 6% source of revenue. And that shows because again, Apple’s retained earnings account is < 0.1% retained earnings. Even if, yes, they pay the bills using money they earn.
If I need to fund an initiative - I could do it one of three ways - income, debt or equity. Is that not an accurate statement?
How many companies now “fund” their compensation with a mixture of income from their business and equity. You’ve been stretching definitions this whole conversation to make it fit your initial wrong statement.
This entire conversation started because someone believed the old wives tail that Microsoft saved Apple by investing $250 million to pro it up or to “fund continuing operations”
Accounting
I’m not really interested in continuing this, but it’s irritating having you write so confidently while making basic mistakes
Finance: “Finance is a broad term that describes activities associated with banking, leverage or debt, credit, capital markets, money, and investments. Essentially, finance represents money management and the process of acquiring needed funds.”
This is exactly what we are talking about? Would you not call the “process of a acquiring needed funds” - funding?
Would debt, income and equity not be the three ways of “acquiring needed funds”?
You're conflating the modern post-iPhone Apple era with the one before.
Apple customers weren't greatly exceeding Microsoft customers before. Every manager up to exec level had a Windows desktop or laptop and possibly a Windows "smartphone".
The MacOS market wasn't inherently much higher in per-capita value than Windows.
[1] Or for modern day companies and inflation, even $1bn.
If you have a company that has 95 PCs and 5 Macs, it helps a lot to say “we are the one neck to choke across your entire enterprise”. It’s helping you sale 100 licenses.
Could any company today that cared about big enterprise go in today without having a Mac solution? The Mac is still a small share of the enterprise market.
It was still a signal. Signals matter, especially when a company is in distress.
> And Office was not charity project for MS, it made a hefty profit. Also it was much easier to convince corporate buyers to buy Office if they could use on Office Suite across their entire organization - even for those hippie Mac users in the corner.
I didn't say it was a charity project and your interpretation is far too lenient for Apple. First of all, Microsoft definitely did NOT have any problems selling Microsoft Office after at least 1995.
Secondly, that "hefty profit" was peanuts for Microsoft. It wasn't a "move the needle" type of investment for them.
They did both those things purely because the DoJ made Gates sweat.
You also don’t seem to remember that it was also to settle the Quicktime lawsuit where Microsoft actually used Apple’s copyrighted code. This was separate from the dumb look and feel lawsuit.
They did both those things to settle a lawsuit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company
most interestingly after Satya Nadella took over from Lord Balmer. they started investing into FOSS and Linux, they absorbed github, Xamarin (FOSS .Net), created WSL/WSL2 which now pretty much works, because for heaven's sake, the munny is in managing the cloud and in providing the workplace desktop productivity suite, not the base OS or infrastructure software...
anyhow.
Novell, Balmer and Microsoft was quite a ride.
If they had been able to monopolize the web to just IE compatibility, what impact might that have had? Could Chrome and Webkit have taken off?
Well, maybe, but I can at least see a good case that things could have been much different.
Chrome took over because it was heavily advertised on what was already the most heavily trafficked site and it was bundled with other downloads.
WebKit “took off” because Apple by then had the resources to port over another open source project and it came with iPhones. It’s still a relatively non contender on the desktop.
They have done this kind of thing before: https://www.justice.gov/atr/memorandum-opinion-us-v-microsof....
Firefox/Chrome are yet another clear example where Microsoft could have completely unraveled anything they did by making it unworkable on the dominant OS Windows.
A few things happened. Sure MS wasn't broken up, but they were forced to be more cautious with how they leveraged their desktop monopoly for several years. Arguably this gave Firefox, and later Chrome, a foot in the door that they otherwise wouldn't have had.
It's important not to fall into binary thinking. Breaking up a (near) monopoly is not the only measure of success in antitrust.
Yes it has. I don't think any antitrust action could be "one and done" in a way that wouldn't allow future abuse of a monopoly position. "Ma Bell" was broken up, but its children have re-coalesed into monopoly-ish companies over time. That's why it's so annoying that US antitrust has been napping for the last 2 decades instead of continuing to monitor and ensure market fairness.
Also if most of the webs content is consolidated into a few sites like reddit, stack exchange and Wikipedia, IMDb etc. then doesn't the search index only need to be about as big as those sites?
I just don't see results I'm getting from today's Google meaningfully far and above the others and increasingly more and more I have to use either another search engine or search the site directly to find what I'm looking for.
This just shows that you weren't actually paying attention to what happened to the MS antitrust trial.
Judge Jackson was all ready to impose serious penalties—I don't recall the exact details, but I know that there was at least talk of spinning off IE from Microsoft entirely.
Then George W Bush was elected, and basically tossed the whole thing out. This set a precedent that has, in part, allowed the massive consolidation in the tech sector we see today.
The Microsoft antitrust trial is a perfect example of the difference between Democrats and Republicans in this country on antitrust.
In any case, regardless of anything you think you know about antitrust over the past several decades, Biden's FTC under Lina Khan has explicitly repudiated the Chicago School bullshit metrics for when monopoly behavior is worth punishing. The importance of this to antitrust in the US cannot be overstated. As long as it is allowed to stand, this will mark a sea change in the way the government treats mergers as well as anticompetitive behavior.
Google ... Google happened. MS dominated computing then, and they would have dominated the web if they could've forced everyone to stay on IE and use their search capabilities. The antitrust trial prevented that and probably can be credited with allowing the modern web explosion. Even if you argue the explosion would've happened, it certainly would've happened slower and undoubtedly poorer, if you were around during the MS era, you would know what I mean.
The 2000 Presidential election happened, resulting in a change of executive policy, both in the big picture ideologically, and arguably specifically with Microsoft for corporate political alignment/influence reasons.
But that’s very much a special case, not a general pattern.
U.S. Gov wants backdoors into Windows? Bill Gates: Yes Sir!
> it's still too early to tell if U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta will side with the Justice Department and try to handcuff one of the world's most dominant tech companies.
Till this point, only DOJ has been arguing their case, and Google will get a chance in a few days according to the schedule. DOJ's entire case rests on the theory of defaults from the arguments they have made. Covered extensively here[1]. Google refuted that with saying how edge and safari are default and yet people switch to chrome. Same with Bing and Google search. So they focused on how mobile makes it hard to switch defaults.
Another vector they went to was how Google Search ads is a market in itself. That would be another antitrust case about advertising dominance, but in here they seem like an add on. It is tough to prove Google is abusing it's monopoly and there is a customer harm. At this point it is hard to tell from the outside given only one side has presented it's case.
After all, this is all related.
Lately, I've been messing with wifi and hostapd. I get massive maps images, and pictures of hotels in the first 1/2 of my respones. I presume "hostapd" is a close mistype to "hotel", and people are searching for high speed wifi, so they may be searching for 80211ac or some such. Or likely google just sees "wifi thing -> wifi", and now I'm apparently searching for "hotel wifi".
Great. I can't get anything meaningful, unless I add -hotel.
They've gone so overboard with loose context matches, that I can't imagine their ad placement has much value.
I'm not fine with it showing up by default.
I'm seriously pissed off when stores (Google Play Store, App Store, Amazon, et al.) show ads when I search for a brand name. Ads show up first for popular item categories, and sometimes take all the space above the fold.
I was looking for HBO Max this weekend. Disney came up first. How is that permissable?
To sell your competitor's name is wholly uncompetitive. A shakedown of every business with an internet presence.
Just because Google was in the right place at the right time shouldn't give it license to continue this shitty behavior -- without innovating or delivering value -- for the rest of all time.
I went for an Apple device to move away from Google-the-nosy-company, but I was happy to leave Google-the-advertising-company too. Yesterday I was searching for "microsoft authenticator" in the app store, and the top result is... another "sponsored" authenticator. WTF, Apple?
The QR code search doesn't do this, so apparently someone decided that text searches should.
People are still believe there are ethical companies, whatever it means for them.
This is especially insidious when you're searching for security or banking apps.
For example on my device I search for "chase" first result is Chime, followed by a box labeled "ads related to your search" with rocket money, Western Union, and a payday loan company.
Then below that is "limited time events" that list the barbie app, uno and some racing game.
Then below that is "You might also like" with Uber, Mahjong, and some habit tracker.
Then below that is "Similar Apps" with wells Fargo, Discover and PNY Bank apps.
Then below that is my search results with the first result being the chase app.
I don't know how this behavior is defensible
This is a security risk.
I don’t know where this came from. If I am googling Cancun it’s the perfect time to show me an ad for less famous destination I never heard of but might end up going to.
If I had somehow never heard of Toyota, telling me it exists when I am looking up Honda is perfect.
I get that there are plenty of times where this is annoying but there are also plenty of times where this unlocks awareness that helps a consumer.
If it's presented as a relevant result, it doesn't seem so good. If it's presented as "you might also be interested in" then it seems better.
It's obvious what I wanted, neither I nor Pepsi are happy about that ad being there...
Google is the gatekeeper of search. (Just as an app store is the gatekeeper of software on a mobile platform.)
Google gets to tax every inquiry into your product, even those with direct sales intent.
If you put people on a bell curve distribution, some non-negligible percentage will always click on the first link. Google taxes all of this.
I see people talking about using big chat or even duckduckgo instead everyday
I get it that Google probably wants to simplify results so that they’re more digestible for the masses, but at least give me a pro mode that doesn’t dumb everything down
Have you done a search on that website recently? There will be around 2-3 actual results, followed by shorts, followed by 2 more real results, then a "People also watched" sections, then a couple more results, then another section, then a couple of results, then a "For you" section, then a couple results, then a "the latest from X" section, then a "From related searches" section.
I'm sorry, did I ASK for all of this nonsense? I was looking for a specific video.
I was searching for some poems by Pablo Neruda. The first few results all had awfully designed pages filled with ads, pop ups, bad fonts - things you don’t want to see when reading a poem.
Yet, these awful sites continue to dominate the SERPs for queries like these because they are all ancient, have tons of backlinks from ages ago, and thus in the eyes of Google, are “authoritative”.
No one wants to put in the effort to create a website that collects, say, poems with a better user experience because they know that most traffic will come from search and they can’t really rank against these ugly old dinosaurs.
off-topic rant begin —>
We have to come out of our nerd bubble and look at ordinary people(yes they are the majority) who are muscle trained to use a handful of fixed things. Both old and new generation will subconsciously open a google search page, or look into FB/TikTok/Instagram. Back in days when I had my first internet, Yahoo! was the default, now the whole internet to majority is just Google/TikTok/FB/Instagram.
If your wife/mother/brother/uncle is a non-tech-savvy person, try changing their default search engine, I will bet a big one that they’ll panic and come back complaining about it.
Google being default won a decades of subconscious training for ordinary folks about their interface and slowly boiled the frog by increasing ad density. People are used to it and expect it.
Off-topic rant end. -x-
That is, the outcome Microsoft seems to be looking for is one where they can reduce both consumer choice and competition by paying to make it more difficult to switch to non-Bing search engines and not allowing Google to pay companies more to make their more widely preferred search engine the default and not lock out the ability to change that default.
They now have to compete against ChatGPT and they are late in the game. To make things worse, their reputation suffered a great deal with techies who despise their whole image and are actively trying to "degoogle" their lives. This may well be the beginning of a slow downturn since these people have an influence on the tech choices made by more "normal" users.
What if it doesn't even matter if they can keep a dominant position of their search engine?
These antitrust cases appear to be just a sign of a much larger pile of trouble ahead for Google.
According to what exactly? Journalist speculation?
It's something I have experienced myself and observed in my surroundings, including many comments on HN that point to the same direction.
Now the internet has become homogenized to a point where outside forces are constantly telling individuals what where to go on the internet.
I use search for doing research and development which is different than shopping or socializing.
Whilst I didn't say that it did, would you mind sharing some sources for your claim?
That (Earnings Call 2023/Q2) says that “search and other” revenue rose to $42.63 billion, up slightly from last year.
Doesn't sound like a big growth story to me. Also it would be interesting to know what "other" means.
Where do you get the traffic numbers from?
> Please get out of your bubble.
Maybe you are in a bubble?
Traffic would be interesting, because it's not that impacted by other factors such as inflation, recessions etc.
It's also important to note that search revenue is not positively impacted by organic searches, which I'd guess would be the majority of what ChatGPT replaces currently.
As for the actual search traffic to Google, I can only refer to my own personal experience. I have certainly changed my habits after AI became mainstream, and as a consequence I now google a lot less. These days I will often hit up ChatGPT (or other AI services) instead of using Google, despite the "opinion" of ChatGPT perhaps being a little less accurate.
[1] yes I know that’s not technically true. I know it’s supppose to the present value of all future returns.
yeah like duck duck crap which after 12+ years and endless marketing is still a niche and still not that good as a search engine? The closest thing to competition is Meta, but that is social networking.
Even Chat GPT is not a threat to the mobile ads dominance of Google. Google ads are everywhere, Bing-Chat integration is just limited to search, and this is assuming people use it, which if Microsoft's failed 20 year foray into search is any indication, is not exactly promising.
But don't underestimate the stupidity to publicly disregard the authority of important nation states.
Once it seems like a company is arrogantly putting itself above "the government"there is the danger that it is perceived as a competitor to the ones deciding public policy which in turn can lead to a swift smack down.
US big tech has become too influential (and self righteous) to continue to ignore on the (intend)national level.
In my opinion their execs should do some strategic groveling and to make sure the gravy keeps rolling.
I think the rubicon has been already crossed on that with the defence contractors and big oil. US gov seems beholden to both and those industries have massively influenced US domestic and foreign policy.
Google, Apple, Meta etc seem to be weirdly incompetent at playing the political publicity game.
Now I use Kagi search, you have to pay for it, but results are great (often better than google) : less SEO spam, a lot of tuning possible, custom searches, small web searches, good image and map searches. And it is supposed to respect your privacy and private data.
Had to use DDG to find the right page.
Ever so often it'll serve me up some completely unrelated stuff, but there's kind of a charm in that. "Oh the thing I am looking for is really not that popular, neat". Unlike google where it'll hit you with tons of seemingly related results.
5/10/20 years from now, all that will be left of Google search is the map/product/store portions, if we even have an internet at all at that point.
Unfortunately though, bing results had suddenly improved a lot recently, which is surprising as I presumed the DDG also uses content from Bing, but they also now serve their own content.
I briefly also tried Qwant and the results are fairly ok ish.. The other Ecosia seems to have decided to spoil the interface design entirely and injects strange ads like the early days of google rot, so didn’t try it much.
Alternatively, I am finding Brave search more tolerable with results being relevant and less content farmy. I tried Kagi a bit and results are pretty nice but it seems to degrade a bit when I search for non-technical stuff there. But they just started and given their duration in service their results are pretty awesome.
P.S. Not affiliated with any of these search engines, just sharing my experience.
For example, kaiser now references google.com instead of googletagmanager.com so people are tracked individually when handling their medical issues.
and they do it offline too.
They have over a quarter of a trillion USD in capital reserves and have acquired (and subsequently given up on) over 250 companies
They are in my view, Microsoft in its anti-trust era. This is only amplified by the more pervasive and aggressively anti-consumer industrial-user relations policy settings than the 1990s had
Their analytics is present on many top sites so they can use browsing patterns to improve their results, on top of telemetry they get from Chrome. Perhaps only Facebook has something close to rivalling that kind of information.
Googlebot and to an extent Bingbot are granted access to most sites that want to be crawled. Any new entrants have to jump through lots of hoops (e.g. Cloudflare) simply to crawl the same web they do.
The UK's Competition and Market's Authority estimated that a credible competitor to Google would need to spend $20 billion just to be in a position to compete.
There's a couple of companies that could realistically compete with their financial clout, one of them is paid ~$20billion a year to be the search default on iOS.
A quarter of the websites on the internet are behind Cloudlfare/Akamai with anti-scraping enabled. Of course they want to end up on Google, so Google/Bing get a green light from Cloudflare.
IMHO, that basically makes it impossible for anybody else to spin up an index and compete with Google Search. They cannot just scrape, they also have to work around anti-scraping measure by these CDNs. They have to maintain these workarounds, while trying to scrape as much as google has scraped so far, which is already a feat in itself.
Once you have this, you have everything: a critical mass of users, ads, data set for AI, ...
I dare anybody to scrape Reddit or Stackoverflow from scratch today.
According to estimates[1], Google indexes ~60 billions pages and Bing is only ~4 billions. If these numbers are close to reality, Bing index is 7% of Google's.
IMHO, this leads to all the problems people complain about Bing. The algorithm is shit because they have less data to fine tune it, people use it less because the algorithm is shit or the results don't show up, so they cannot collect data to fine tune the algorithm more, ...
When Google was just starting to gain popularity its search results weren't much better than Altavista's. Yet, its interface was much cleaner, it loaded and spewed out results faster, the overall experience was better. Bing is the Altavista. The user is bombarded with cookies, logotypes, ads, maps - all that complex layout right from the start. As a user you feel napalmed by information, and nobody likes that.
I do remember yahoo's home page was terrible, although I think there was a clean search.yahoo.com page no one knew about. Back then (and even now) having the search page load fast was pretty important so this always seemed like a nasty own goal.
In the early days it was search that drove chrome adoption and now its the other way around. With the low quality of search results, I doubt many would even notice if the default search engine is switched to something else.
I should be able to move off everything else after I retire.
People can much more easily switch search engines than Operating Systems.
And then there are Electron apps…
I guess it depends on where Chrome ends up. As part of Google, payments would continue. As an independent venture, not a chance.
Windows desktop share ~80%
Mac OS ~10%MSFT: $358 -> $2,480 vs AAPL: $8 -> $2,790
Apple is no-one's Firefox.
It is in terms of OS market share.
Sure, if by 10% you mean less than 3%, and we handwave Mozilla's market cap to several hundred billion dollars more than Google, and we skip over the fact that the "80%" share ignores the dominant modern computing platform, then yeah no sure, I hear ya.
Also Firefox doesn't need that much money to survive. They have too much even paying their C-staff millions of dollars per year.
> Schaub... believes the fairest outcome in the trial would an across-the-board ban on all default agreements between two companies
They are also far closer to having monopoly power in key markets.
Which ones are those?
They also have extremely tight control over the app store to a much greater extent than what Google has asserted. They are both problematic, though.