It's becoming clear to me that Google has become a far, far worse monopoly than Microsoft ever was. Microsoft just controlled our computers; Google controls our access to history.
Google is becoming worse monopoly trough natural evolution of it's core business. It seems more offhand way. Network effects and economies of scale. Microsoft monopoly grew by planning and plotting. Bill Gates had genuinely sinister motivations and used deception and dirty play.
To fix problems caused by Google, you need to change the principles of competition law. Microsoft was knowingly doing lots of stuff that violated laws. It was just very hard to prove it.
It's kind of weird to get this question when you lived it and there seems to be relatively little to Google.
I mean, it was all in the news, trade magazines, business journals. Blackmailing OEM's, intentionally breaking things and making them incompatible. At least the legal battles are documented somewhere and Wikipedia has something about them, but they were just the tip of the iceberg.
Dan Gilmour's articles in San Jose Mercury news from 90's should be somewhere.
Basically small software startups had to have Microsoft Strategy. They had to find way to stay out of Microsoft radar or MS would steal their work, their developers or block them. You sue them like Stack did and MS just stalls few years and pays few millions in damages. It was worth of losing in court to protect monopoly.
Big OEM's like Dell had to do what MS said or MS would up their price. It was straight blackmail from monopoly position.
Disagree in that they’ve already done plenty of damage.
Easiest example is with RSS - entered the RSS Reader market for free and at a loss and effectively killed competition because you cannot compete with that. Then subsequently killed Google Reader. This chain of moves essentially drove RSS to being obsolete which in turn made everyone far more reliant on Google and social media.
Now extend this to other products that they’ve started for free and subsequently killed. It’s not the same as embrace, extend, extinguish, but the result is the same. You kill off competition and stunt progress.
I don’t think RSS is a good example. Everyone I know who used google reader switched to a different RSS reader;
It’s mostly that RSS isn’t monetizable as easily as web pages. I think FB and Twitter dropping their feeds had a more significant effect; regardless, RSS was always niche.
If we’re going to go with anecdotes, I can counter with all of my friends (entirely non-technical) simply stopped consuming via RSS because there were no alternatives at that time that ticked all the boxes.
For me, the key is that Google Reader actually killed off competing products during its existence. Then when they killed of Google Reader, that stunted the ecosystem because anyone who wanted to provide an alternative was starting from the ground up. All the time that could have been spent driving RSS forward was instead spent on catchup.
FB and Twitter dropping their feeds may not have happened if the RSS ecosystem evolved to benefit them in some way.
Now occurs to me that one could clone any given Google service (product), ensure maximum compatibility, wait for Google to biff, and then welcome all the orphans.
Yeah, they all realized how much tracking and advert impressions you lose with RSS. It seems like that's happened with a lot of web technologies that aren't conducive to that since Google's taken the reins.
But Gmail is interoperable with other mail systems and they didn't create incompatible extensions to email (AFAIAA); that's quite different to how IE6 was.
If Gmail required emails themselves to be in a special format that broke other MUA and IE6 wouldn't render standards compliant emails in a way you could read. That would be analogous to what IE6 was up to.
> If Gmail required emails themselves to be in a special format that broke other MUA and IE6 wouldn't render standards compliant emails in a way you could read.
Gmail is as notorious as IE6 was for its rather poor support of HTML and CSS in email.
I used that as an opportunity to leave most Google services all together, the product decisions just can't be trusted from a user perspective.
For most services there's a better alternative (e.g. DuckDuckGo with bangs for search, native apps whenever possible, markdown for notes and texts) - in general this was a learning process for me to distrust systems that control me more than the other way around by creating a lock-in to an ecosystem.
I feel it's worth taking the time to understand systems a bit more. Once the learning is there, much of the convenience that Google offers can be replicated through good processes and automation.
I dunno, I look out at the world and think that maybe making journalism unprofitable may have had some negative effects that are a bit bigger than web standards not advancing that fast?
Personally I would pay a decent subscription to a journal or newspaper if they offered incredibly high quality content ad-free. Instead what we have are cheap ad-saturated papers competing with each other to the lowest common denominator.
To get to be a 'journal or newspaper that offers incredibly high quality content ad-free' you need funding. Arguably you also need to go up against the richest and most powerful people in the World, and you need to protect against someone buying it and shutting it down.
You need a lot of principles and some money, getting those things together in the same place seems hard.
Was news in the past better ( more comprehensive? more verified?), or just better presented?
News in the distant past was more sensationalist and overtly political.
News in the more recent past tried to be a little more hands off of politics. The market dynamics were usually such that you wanted to sell both to the left and the right. Some newsmen idealized this and sold the product with the idea of an allegiance to fact, and the idea that the facts would speak for themselves. Opinions were indulged on the editorial page (where advertisers fear to tread) and they could be safely ignored. Opinions were avoided elsewhere. Sensationalism was for tabloids; major papers achieved respect and a reputation and premium prices with their restraint.
News of the present finds the market dynamics have reverted; overt partisanship and sensationalism drive reader engagement again — but we’ve got a ways to go before we have overtly political journalism everywhere and widespread cases of yellow journalism like in the past.
I'm of two minds on this and they aren't totally squared together, but I think they are both fair.
1. I'm somewhat nostalgic to physical newspapers for a couple of reasons, I think because they were physical and required a little bit more effort. They felt more authoritative and verifiable, that's the nostalgia. However I think there was another benefit to the journalists, because they were crafting a physical body of work, I probably naively believe it instilled a sense of duty in that work. Personally I feel like if my product (not code) was a fleeting piece of information, easily changeable and forgotten among a deluge of other work. I would not feel as obligated to honor the craft. So in short, less comprehensive and better verified and presented.
2. News was concentrated, I don't think this was necessarily a good thing. This is somewhat contradictory to 1. But I think this concentration was an easier to accept narrative and speaking to my above point, that presented a level of even-headedness to the whole affair of understanding the world and our place in it. The firehose that was unleashed with Google was good, but it then signaled the death of lots of rational measured thought and brought us to where we are today.
Those formats exists. For example, I am subscribed to Krautreporter [1] from Germany. They started with a Kickstarter campaign in 2014 and are now organized as a "Genossenschaft" and are entirely supported by memberships and subscriptions.
Google are smart enough to maintain a duopoly (iOS, Office/365, Safari) Whereas Microsoft tried to kill all competitors (and all too often succeeded). That’s a huge difference.
Though Android's marketshare today is extremely similar to Windows compared to macOS early in the period for which Microsoft is criticized. Similarly, Safari and Firefox combined have low enough marketshare (currently estimated around 21%) versus Chrome estimated 65% (and growing) to make real, very concerned comparisons to the early parts of the IE6 era, if not its peak (yet).
The difference is that it is still early and Google hasn't killed their competitors yet. I can't tell you whether or not they are "trying" to, just that I agree with the above poster that Google has the potential to be worse, and possibly history repeating itself on some of the exact same product lines.
