Disagree. People use Google because it's the default, not because they will go out of their way to keep using it. The minute Apple changes the iPhone default, all but a few iPhone users stop using Google.
Is this actually true?
Microsoft has bent over backwards trying making it inconvenient to get Chrome + Google on any new device. There's even the whole "Edge is the #1 browser to install Chrome" meme. Normies just really like Google.
The company I currently work at is 95% Bing users because they all use Edge and Bing is the default.
It's a medium sized company of normal non techie people.
The default matters.
Since W11 I've seen much more _normies_ use Edge and the result is that they are using Bing for their searches.
On the other hand, Google is the default on Android's Chrome and iOS' Safari, so they use Google there.
Its not uncommon to search for product X, only to find product Z being ranked above the official store of X. Google search is advertisement first, quality second.
Bing may be equally crappy too. Microsoft "welcome to edge" page is a bunch of advertisement for Microsoft products and then in the corner there is a search window. I have not tested bing itself to see if their flood of advertisements are as bad as google, but I sure do not trust Microsoft. Windows start menu being overloaded with advertisements are a cautionary tale of what happen when Microsoft is copying google.
Normies do not like having advertisement being thrown in their face, but they will tolerate it if they have no choice or if the advertisement is hidden enough that they do not know that what they see is a bought listing.
I'm surprised there hasn't been a class action racketeering charge brought. And this is exactly how a protection racket works. You wouldn't want some other brand in the top position when they search for your brand term. You should just pay us to make sure that doesn't happen.
While I was at eBay, there was a company announcement praising one executive who had noticed that eBay spent a lot of money on placing Google ads for searches like "ebay", when obviously someone searching for "ebay" can find it in the search results. He canceled the ads, and it worked! There was no significant decline in traffic.
But that's a problem for Google, and the situation you describe is the obvious solution. If people won't advertise on searches where they should appear in the actual results, the way to get them to advertise is to stop having actual results.
Yes and no.
Yes, it has been demonstrated time and time again that most people do not go and change the defaults even if they could. Most people actually prefer having less dials, even if they say they want more dials.
No, because Chrome isn't the default in Windows (ChromiumEdge), MacOS (Safari), iOS (Safari), most if not all the Linuxes (Firefox), and most if not all the BSDs (Firefox). Chrome is only the default browser in Android, but Android is a Google operating system so this shouldn't be a surprise. Also, this is one of the most spectacular exceptions to most people not changing defaults.
Meanwhile if the search bar works when typing things in and gives you good results, I think a lot of people will be fine with whatever.
I mean Google obviously thinks it is otherwise they wouldn't be paying Apple $20 billion a year.
Remember that Google was paying Apple 20 BILLION for the privilege, and a key reason they had an antitrust case against them!
Chrome utterly dominates Edge on Windows, despite Edge being default.
How do you explain that?
The reality is that people know what they like, and most will switch to the thing they like most. Especially when it costs nothing.
To say defaults don't matter because Chrome is used on Windows is a bit absurd. Chrome in 2012-2014 was still trading blows with IE even after the tremendous shortcomings during the Windows 8 and 8.1 era. This was a time when everyone was telling people to not use IE, and yet it retained ~20% use. Nothing like now where Chrome dominates ~70%.
Further, anytime a user has to connect to an account for email, calendars, and other essentials, the OS will direct them through the native browser app. This means the so-called "popularity" reflects little more than the number of active devices: Android > iOS > Windows.
Also Edge use being far lower in Desktop use indicates that there's little difference between defaults and lock ins functionally.
You: No, defaults aren't incredibly powerful.
Obviously, defaults matter to some degree. They have a price. Google and Apple are companies with market caps in the trillions, and at their scale the default has a price in billions, since a small shift redirects a ton of ad revenue. That's fine.
But they're not "incredibly powerful", which implies that most users won't change them. As I pointed out, most users do change from Edge to Chrome.
If defaults were so "incredibly powerful", Edge would be winning. Obviously, therefore, they're not. Defaults have a small-to-medium amount of power. (Which, at Apple+Google scale, happens to be a lot of cash.)
This is HN's regular reminder that market cap measures the value of the company in the eyes of investors, not its revenue or profit.
Apple had gross revenue of $365 billion and Google $257 billion in 2021, the year in which Google paid Apple $26 billion.
That means that in that year Google paid Apple a solid 10% of their revenue and Google's payment accounted for 7% of Apple's gross revenue. To put that in perspective: that puts this deal on the same scale of importance as a car payment or utilities are for the average US household.
For now. Don't expect it to last: Edge is just a re-skin of Chromium, so after V2 support is completely removed by Google, Edge will have to follow along or fork the code.
What you're proposing just sounds like a lot of extra work for MS, without any measurable gain. Sure, it'd be nice, in the broader interest of reducing Chrome's dominance and promoting browser diversity, but I don't see how there's any incentive for MS to do it.
Launch Edge > Search "Google" > Bing displays Google Search link > Click > Google Search tells user to install Chrome > User installs Chrome > Google maintains browser and search engine monopoly
Some defaults can absolutely be over ridden by a non-stop barrage of interstitial pages and ad banners imploring your to install Chrome because all the default tools you use are Google sites, which just circles back to defaults mattering.
Browse the web as a normie would, without adblocker/etc extensions and other techy web saavy, and it should quickly become apparent why. Telling people to google something is like telling them to wade into a sewer.
What will happen is that people will use Bing without knowing it and then complain that “Google is broken”. To many people, search is google in the same way that a Kleenex is a tissue.
And then ubiquitous Youtube dealing the killing blow: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/05/ex-youtube-engineer-...
Your article says that Microsoft themselves were working to move people away from Internet Explorer 6 and encouraging people to upgrade to a modern browser by declaring IE 6 to be at its end of life.
The article says that Youtube displayed a banner recommending users to upgrade to either Firefox, IE 8, or Chrome and that due to concerns by Google's lawyers, the order of the browsers was to be randomized so to avoid the appearance of giving undue prominence to Chrome. Finally the article ends by noting that each of the three options Youtube recommended were chosen equally as opposed to Chrome being the option picked by most people who saw the banner.
This sounds like the exact opposite of shoving it down peoples throats and instead trying to be very careful to move people away from a browser that Microsoft themselves had declared was dead, and onto an alternative option by trying to be as fair as possible.
The significance of your article isn't that Google shoved Chrome down everyone's throat in order to kill off a competitor, it's that due to its popularity and dominant position, Youtube was more effective at getting people to stop using Internet Explorer 6 than Microsoft was, but both companies had the same objective.
Here is an article about Microsoft's own "Friends don't let friends use Internet Explorer 6." which discusses Microsoft's own efforts to get people to stop using IE 6. It's about the same period of time as the article you mentioned.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-friends-dont-let-fri...
It's not. The article talks about Youtube nailing the final nail in IEs coffin, which it did.
As for shoving Chrome down everyone's throats I'm amazed no one remembers the ancient history of just 15 years ago:
- showing it on search pages: http://www.webandsay.com/archives/google-is-actively-pushing... - prominently showing it on Youtube: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/11/how-google-promotes...
Ah well, c'est la vie!
Let's see:
- huge ad banners promoting Chrome
- literally almost singlehandedly killing IE 6.0
- sabotaging Firefox: https://archive.is/tgIH9
This... this is not ancient history. It happened 10-15 years ago. Unless you're very young, and I've fallen under the curse of the old age:
--- start quote ---
One disorienting thing about getting older that nobody tells you about is how weird it feels to get a really passionate, extremely wrong lecture from a much younger person about verifiable historical events you can personally remember pretty well
--- end quote ---
Two different articles describing things a year apart. Youtube was pushing only Chrome long before they presented the three options to kill IE.
These days Chrome just has so much mind-share that it overcomes the defaults on Windows. This is by no means a common outcome. This is anecdotal, but I know far more people who use Safari instead of Chrome on macOS than who use Edge instead of Chrome on Windows; Microsoft just has such a bad reputation when it comes to browsers that Chrome is able to get over that defaults hump on Windows. But a lot of people genuinely like Safari, and trust Apple in general, so the effect is (somewhat) lessened on macOS, even though IIRC Chrome still does have the lead in market share there. Just less of one, percentage-wise.
Chrome was a much better browser compared to the default that came installed on Windows, and certainly if someone is going to switch away from the default they will do it towards a much better alternative, on that we agree.
However, despite how much I think Google as a search engine has declined in quality, I still find them to be significantly superior to the alternatives, such as Bing and even DuckDuckGo (which I believe predominantly makes use of Bing) and that people will switch from whatever default search engine Apple sets to Google.
Apple doesn't have this problem.
Microsoft is literally doing this, and yet...
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/12/microsoft-edge-will-...
[1] https://www.crn.com.au/news/google-may-pre-install-chrome-br...
[2] https://thenextweb.com/news/sony-computers-google-chrome-bro...
Yes, putting a single button with vague words in front of users almost always gets a lot of clicks, which we've known for decades, and it turns out, if you have the attention of nearly the entire web-browsing world, you can put that button in front of people's faces way more than your competitors. It should have been considered billions of dollars of free advertising for Chrome that should have been assessed against them somehow.
It's blatantly unfair and should have been shut down in literally days, but nooooooooo we aren't allowed to have regulation here in the states.
An interesting thought experiment might be to imagine if Chrome was actually somehow the default browser on Windows and/or macOS. I think we could expect Edge's and/or Safari's market share numbers to be much lower than they are now if that were the case.
Using market dominance to enter other markets is the problem…
I say this as a heavy apple user myself btw.