OpenAI is just Netscape at this point
374 karma · joined November 15, 2011
You need at least 4. And another one for power supplies.
I like playing around with Omarchy since there are a lot of interesting ideas put together in a semi cohesive 'OS', but would probably not use it for anything serious until it became a bit more mature.
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Market share is currently Google (91%), Bing (4%), Yandex (<2%), Baidu (<1%), Brave (<1%)
Google can and do already monetize automated search from AI models.
Heck, if they wanted to, Google could turn off search and make you go through their AI model to get information.
Imagine that. That's how powerful they are.
This is why Google will win the race over most of its competitors. They own search.
The WWW in the 1990s was an explosion of data. To the casual observer, the web-browser appeared to be the internet. But it wasn't and in itself could never make money (See Netscape). The internet was the data.
The people who build the infrastructure for the WWW (Worldcom, Nortel, Cisco, etc.) found the whole enterprise to be an extremely loss-making activity. Many of them failed.
Google succeeded because it provided an application layer of search that helped people to navigate the WWW and ultimately helped people make sense of it. It helped people to connect with businesses. Selling subtle advertising along the way is what made them successful.
Facebook did the same with social media. It allowed people to connect with other people and monetized that.
Over time, as they became more dominant, the advertising got less subtle and then the income really started to flow.
Salesforce is similar in that it helps businesses connect with and do business with each other. They just use a subscription model, rather than advertising. This works because the businesses that use it can see a direct link to it and their profitability.
The only way OpenAI can survive is to replicate this model. But it probably doesn't have the traffic to pull it off unless it can differentiate itself from the already crowded competition.
Mozilla is a non-profit that is only sustained by the generous wealthy benefactor (Google) to give the illusion that there is competition in the browser market.
OpenAI is a non-profit funded by a generous wealthy benefactor (Microsoft).
Ideas of IPO and profitability are all just pipe dreams in Altmans imagination.
OpenAI is a basket case:
- Too expensive and inconvenient to compete with commoditized, bundled assistants (from Google/ Microsoft/Apple)
- Too closed to compete with cheap, customizable open-source models
- Too dependent on partners
- Too late to establish its own platform lock-in
It echoes what happened to:
- Netscape (squeezed by Microsoft bundling + open protocols)
- BlackBerry (squeezed by Apple ecosystem + open Android OS)
- Dropbox (squeezed by iCloud, Google Drive, OneDrive + open tools like rclone)
When you live between giants and open-source, your margin collapses from both sides.
One one side it's up against large competitors with an already established user base and product line that can simply bundle their AI offerings into those products. Google will do just what Microsoft did with Internet Explorer and bundle Gemini in for 'Free' with their already other profitable products and established ad-funded revenue streams.
At the same time, Deepseek/Qwen, etc. are open sourcing stuff to undercut them on the other side. It's a classic squeeze on their already fairly dubious business model.
If it says traffic lights just click on the ones you can see lit and not the posts and ignore them if they are too far in the distance. Seems to work for me.