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Comment by stormbrew | Hacker News Reader

> No company today has reach or influence anything like what Microsoft had during the golden era of the PC. Not Apple, not Google, and not Microsoft itself.

I think Google is pretty close, really. They obviously don't have an operating system for laptops or desktops that everyone uses, but using a computer without Google products is something that people just don't really do anymore. iOS, Android, OSX, Windows, Ubuntu, etc. no matter what you're probably using something Google wrote on it.

Which is really a very old-school Microsoft strategy brought up to date to the early 21st century. Google recognized that the OS doesn't matter anymore and Microsoft continued to believe it was everything.

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> Google recognized that the OS doesn't matter anymore and Microsoft continued to believe it was everything.

I think they recognize all too well that it matters, which is seen by the massive effort in developing and supporting Android, Chrome OS etc. This is just Googles version of Microsoft giving away IE.

I think they do these projects more out of a concern of being shut out of other OS' the way Netscape was effectively shut out of Windows. And that shows in which of those platforms they've placed the most effort: the one where their competitor is the most likely to shut them out.

How was Netscape shut out of Windows?

Aside from the fact that IE being bundled made it far less likely for someone to go looking for another browser, they were shut out from being bundled by OEMs and ISPs through restrictive covenants[0][1]. It obviously wasn't impossible to install Netscape, but situations where Netscape was the user's first entry to the web became extremely unlikely.

This isn't really controversial, it was one of the major factors of the antitrust case against MS, and MS didn't argue they didn't do it, only that it wasn't illegal afaik.

[0] http://www.businessweek.com/1998/42/b3600109.htm [1] http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f2600/2613toc_htm.htm

Sure but calling this 'shutout' is pretty abusive of language to me. Is Chrome shut out of modern macs? Safari does come bundled after all. And I don't consider the DoJ case to have any merit so there's no authority in it.

Agree with the language or not, it's the kind of thing that Google fears. Though things have changed a lot since 1998 and being bundled is nowhere near as important as it was then. Hell, PCs and laptops aren't as important as they were then.

Really, the situation Google needs to keep pressure on, to prevent a modern equivalent to what happened to Netscape, was almost acted out with Maps on iOS.

As for whether the case had any merit.. ok? What I said doesn't rely on the case having merit. Like I said, MS admitted to doing this.

Exactly.

using a computer without Google products is something that people just don't really do anymore

This is rather naive. In certain circles yes but by far the majority of people use just their search.

Is there some particular reason to exclude that? Because most of those people who 'just' use their search use their search a lot.

People use Google-search because it's the default in all browsers.

That's why Google is still paying Mozilla money to make it the default in Firefox and it's why Google made Android and Chrome to be able to control what web-services people use by default, also on their mobile devices.

If the defaults switch from Google, most people wont notice. If you have any doubts about that, observe all people which has their search hijacked by malware.

Their search page has been diverted to a scummy non-Google page and nobody notices that anything is wrong.

Google definitely has a strong hold on the web, but they're a lot more fragile than you think.

And most people used Windows in the late 90s/early 2000s because Microsoft effectively paid every single OEM to do so and locked them in to restrictive covenants against shipping anything else. For the purposes of comparison it doesn't really matter why everyone uses their products, all that matters is that they do.

I'm not really sure on what you're judging my thoughts on their fragility. I made a pretty simple claim, that the vast majority of people use something Google made regardless of who made their OS. Could someone topple them out of that? Of course. Just like someone toppled Microsoft and IBM before them. It will cost a boatload of money, but someone will eventually do it.

I just don't see how an arbitrary exclusion refutes the claim, or what relevance it has to the price of rice in china. It'd be like saying "Not everyone uses a Microsoft product every day because Windows doesn't count" in 1999. Well... ok then.

Yes because it is instantly replaceable with nothing more than a meh on the part of the user.

So many people will be so happy to learn how easily people will give up google search. Maybe that's the secret that got Nadella the job? He knows he just has to ask people nicely and they'll all use Bing. No more spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ad campaigns, silly Balmer.

Not suggesting Bing. I'm only suggesting "not Google".

Times change. Google's core business doesn't.

But there isn't brand loyalty with free web products. Users are fickle. I happily used AltaVista, Yahoo! and Lycos before moving to this weirdly named Google thing. I happen to use it because it is the default but change the default (without asking) and eventually people won't mind. Having said that, I do find Bing awkward, so perhaps I do use Google out of necessity, but not loyalty.

If Lycos was the last thing you used before switching to google that means that it's been probably about 13-15 years since you switched. On the web that's an eternity. If that's fickle then Google must be pretty happy to have its users be so fickle.

Haha good point

I used Altavista to the last to be honest. I used to have an email account with Altavista, then had to go to Hotmail after they closed, then GMail when it was brand new (fortunate enough to have an invitation from someone). I only used Lycos for their FTP search.

This is rather naive. In certain circles yes but by far the majority of people use just their search.

So you are saying a vast majority of people don't use gmail, google maps, or youtube. I'd venture to guess a vast majority of people use at least one of those things on a regular basis.

No, not really. It's still exceedingly easy to make Google a bit player in your life. For example, I use Apple gear for my home computer / phone / tablet (although I have a custom AOSP tablet for work - we flash our own firmware for it though, so it's not really google-y). I use Google for maybe 5% of my searches, I only use GMail for work, and quite frankly we could switch at a moment's notice to another email solution), and I only use Google Maps when I want to look at a map on my work PC, which runs linux.

Apart from the 5% of search that I find I need Google for, the rest is very easy to switch out. Compare that to the world of computing in the 90s. Your computer needed to be able to read FAT32. Your web site needed to work well for IE. There was only one valid office suite out there. Most peripherals only came with Windows drivers, shutting everyone else out of the fun. Indeed one part of the rebirth of the Mac was the recognition that peripheral driver support would have to be done in-house, rather than relying on 3rd parties to provide Mac drivers for their products.

The Microsoft dominance of the 90s made computing on competing platforms difficult. Google does not have anything like that level of domination / lock-in.

I predict Android will enjoy a period of dominance that will be remarkably the same as Windows. Android will dominate mobile devices, plus a few other areas like maybe cars, appliances, TVs, some wearables, and the random embedded things that used to run Windows CE and Windows Embedded, very much in the way Windows dominates PCs. Probably, like Windows, for decades.

The question is whether that will matter the way Windows mattered to computing. I would have expected, for example, a lot more people who write software for the enterprise to start making tablet apps. They're not. I don't know if this is a wave that is late coming in, or if vendors think touch Web apps will be good enough (which they are not, for anything that is popular in an app store), or if that kind of dominance just doesn't matter as much anymore.

Android is a pretty sweet tablet OS, and I could see there being a lot more of it where PCs are serving as office productivity nodes. Tablets have the potential to to change the workplace for the better: Users not tied to heavy PCs or laptops in cubicle workspaces, etc. But it's slow to take off.

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