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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

This is basically what people were saying about Microsoft versus Google and other upstarts in the early 2000s.

Slow and steady wins the race. How could they lose to something on the web, when Microsoft owns the web browser itself? Everything runs on Windows and IE. They can just relax and wait for competitors to exhaust themselves, then quickly build their own version. Isn’t that how Netscape lost. Etc.

Now Google is the new Microsoft, just like Microsoft became the new IBM.

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> This is basically what people were saying about Microsoft versus Google and other upstarts in the early 2000s.

They would have been right if Google's marquee product was an Office Suite.

Google was the AI company before AI companies were a thing. The comparison with Microsoft and IBM are misplaced because they failed to capture new territory; ML/AI is Google's stomping grounds. The criticism that Google is bad at consumer chatbots is true, but that's not where the real future value lays.

I've never heard or read anyone saying this in the early 2000s. They had publicly stated their contempt of the web earlier, made fools of themselves when they realized their mistake and went all-in on it, and spent the whole decade lagging behind. The closest they had to an online success was Wizzes.

A big difference is the existential levels of debt.

Yes Google is the new Microsoft, even Microsoft is still the old Microsoft but OpenAI is not the new Google.

For some of us OpenAI is already the new Google. I prefer chatgpt even when I'm searching for web links. Google Search had already been deteriorating terribly even before the rise of LLMs.

But Microsoft seems to be doing fine too ?

And IBM has a market cap of over $200 billion.

When the market keeps expanding, you don’t need to kill your predecessor. The shelf life for legacy enterprise computing is very long.

Not in AI. But they announced things last week so maybe..

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