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Comment by VikingCoder | Hacker News Reader

Pardon me - can I ask analogy to better understand your point of view?

What kind of tires come on your Ford truck?

If Ford chooses the "default" tires you get on your F-150... is that anti-competitive, for all other tire manufacturers?

Must Ford give you the option which tires you want on your new F-150? Must they do it in a way that doesn't start with a "default"?

Or is the problem not that Ford picks a tire manufacturer, but that the tire manufacturer cannot in your mind share the profits back with Ford?

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Not the person you are responding to but I think it’s more like if Goodyear had 90 percent of the tire market and paid every single manufacturer to be the default tires. Sure consumers could choose but realistically most people go with the default.

Makes it impossible for smaller incumbents to compete

Poor analogy.

Tires are safety-critical equipment with a minimum bar of performance and externally imposed regulations on them that they function at an acceptable level. This makes them a mostly fungible commodity. Search engines are not, and as Google shows, have no minimum bar of performance that a reasonable person can expect.

Also you buy tires once, and then beyond wear and tear they don’t just randomly degrade one day. With search engines you are continuously subject to the daily whims of Google beancounters.

There's a million other parts of your car that don't have any particular minimum bar of performance, or externally imposed regulation. By what right does Ford get to choose a default glove compartment, or sun flaps, or volume infotainment knob, etc, etc, etc.

What? That’s an even worse analogy. Being integral parts of the Ford truck, it’s like saying that users should have a choice of what programming language Google used for its services, or what brand server it uses in its data centers, or which brand of networking equipment it uses — utterly meaningless.

Tires don't control access to knowledge on an ongoing basis. I also own the tires in perpetuity. Arguably in the grand scheme of things tires are just not that important compared to something like a search engine. Tires are a commodity. Search isn't and so they need to be treated differently.

I don't think I'd entertain putting them at the same level and so the analogy falls apart.

Other examples come to mind:

* Dedicated Netflix button on TV remotes (you can't even change this)

* SiriusXM bundled (with free trial) with car stereos

The difference is that the tyre manufacturers don't pay Ford to stick their tyres on Ford's vehicles.

No, but yes.

They're not paying Ford for putting a Michelin tire on the vehicle, but they are likely getting an above "volume order" discount.

Similar to Search engines, how often do you hear about people changing the brand of tire on their vehicle? How often is it just "I bought another of what I already had"?

Disclaimer: Former Googler, though in Cloud.

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