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Comment by EternalFury | Hacker News Reader

Think of Google as of a tanker ship. It takes a while to change course, but it has great momentum. Sundar just needs to make sure the course is right.

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That's almost word for word what people said about Windows Phone when I was at Microsoft.

Was the Windows Phone ever at the frontier tho?

Windows Phone was superior to everything else on the market at the time. But phones are an ecosystem, and MS was a latecomer.

That's a wild claim. Windows phone was garbage from the start. And the UI was terrible.

It is a lot easier to switch LLMs than it is to switch smartphone platforms.

But Windows Phone was actually good, like Xune, it was just late, and it was incredibly popular to hate Microsoft at the time.

Additionally, Microsoft didn't really have any advantage in the smart phone space.

Google is already a product the majority of people on the planet use regularly to answer questions.

That seems like a competitive advantage to me.

Yeah, I liked my windows phone, not sure why they killed it

> But Windows Phone was actually good

I think people just have rose-tinted glasses on. Sure the hardware from Nokia was great, but software was very poor even by the standards of that time.

Windows Phone was actually great though, and would've eventually been a major player in the space if Microsoft were stubborn enough to stick with it long enough, like they did with the Xbox.

By his own admission, Gates was extremely distracted at the time by the antitrust cases in Europe, and he let the initiative die.

And where is the ship headed if they are no longer supporting the open web?

Publishers are being squeezed and going under, or replacing humans with hallucinated genai slop.

It’s like we’re taking the private equity model of extracting value and killing something off to the entire web.

I’m not sure where this is headed, but I don’t think Sundar has any strategy here other than playing catch up.

Demis’ goal is pretty transparently positioning himself to take over.

The Web is dead. It’s pretty clear future web pages, if we call them that, will be assembled on-the-fly by AI based your user profile and declared goals, interests and requests.

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