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Comment by crowcroft | Hacker News Reader

I know everyone cites this as the innovators dilemma, but so far the evidence suggests this isn't true.

ChatGPT has been around for a while now, and it hasn't led to a collapse in Google's search revenue, and in fact now Google is rushing to roll out their version instead of trying to entrench search.

A famous example is the iPhone killing the iPod, and it took around 3 and a half years for the iPod to really collapse, so chat and co-pilots might be early still. On the other hand handheld consumer electronics have much longer buying cycles than software tools.

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maybe its too early. I almost never google search anymore, a lot of my friends do the same. Kind of like after I was using google for years, lots and lots of people were still using sites like ask jeaves, but the writing was on the wall

Maybe. I can't be the only one who gets irked by the slow, typing-out response from copilot/gpt when google gets me instant results. Near instant or a lot faster result might convince me to use whatever gpt search

honestly I use the free version and the text is really fast. Lets take a look at a typical question I may send to chat gpt:

>I have some tasks, some of them maintenance, some of them relaxation that I do >before bed. For example, maintenance: >brush teeth, floss, water floss, put on nose strips, take prylosec. >For relaxation: >stretch, massage gun, ASMR, music, tiger balm, salt bath, movie, tea, nasal >clean, moisturize. >can you suggest some others tasks?

Google can't even handle this. if you try, the entire page is filled with Videos: ... with 4 video thumbnails from youtube on how to use a water pic.

So I scroll off down (by now chat gpt already has a response) half a page on 'people also ask' with 4 questions about water pics, keep scrolling,

finally search results, and all of them are about ... water pics/flossers.

Google is big enough to avoid innovators dilemma. You just create a new company and leave it alone.

I reckon it is more that you needed special circumstances and series of events to become OpenAI. Not just cash and smart people.

> ChatGPT has been around for a while now

ChatGPT has been around for less that 15 months[1]. In what version of reality is that "a while now"? Your iPhone/iPod timeline is also off by about 9 years[2].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_Shuffle

'A while now' being long enough that I might expect some notable impact on Google's business by now. I do agree it could just be too early.

My iPhone/iPod timeline is referring to the time it took for the iPod's sales to be severely impacted [1]. I'm not disputing that the iPod continued to exist for a long time, the iPod Touch wasn't discontinued until 2022, but it was a pretty meaningless part of Apple's business by that point.

1. https://i.insider.com/597b68f2b50ab162018b466b?width=1300&fo...

Blackberry chugged along with record profits for a couple of years after the iphone had already made them irrelevant.

Yea, this is a good example that it might just be too soon still to say.

There was a period where it was not obvious that the iPhone or Blackberry would become the dominant player in the field and it could be true with search and AI chat etc too.

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