Google | The Microsoft of the late 90s
As of Feb 2020, Chrome has an absolute monopoly in the browser market share:
With Safari far behind at a meager 17%.
Microsoft: Journey from The Oppressor to the Oppressed
In the 90s, the reason Microsft started Internet Explorer was that it thought the browser could make an Operating System obsolete:
1995: Microsoft CEO Bill Gates throws his company wholeheartedly into supporting, enhancing and profiting from the internet. He calls the growing phenomenon “the internet tidal wave.”
On May 26, 1995, Gates wrote an internal memo (entitled “The Internet Tidal Wave”) which ordered his subordinates to throw all the company’s resources into launching a single-minded attack on the web browser market.
By the early 2000s, Microsoft had won:
But the cost, a historic antitrust lawsuit:
A decade later, history has repeated itself. The Oppressor has become the Oppressed.
Two decades later, Netscape founder's prediction has come true. Chrome is now our default application for everything online.
Where does Google derive real power over us?
Google Services are replaceable:
The thing that cannot be replaced is the infrastructure of the entire internet: Android & Chrome.
Just ask Baidu, it provides all the Google Services in China but without a browser or mobile operating system of its own, its market cap(31 Billion $) is far far lower than its American counterpart(766 Billion $) as of writing this blog. But if we consider the market cap of other Chinese tech giants with their American counterparts, they are very similar to each other- Alibaba~Amazon and Facebook~Tencent. Both Baidu and Google make the majority of their money through ad services, their fates are completely different due to lack of Chrome and Android.
Google dictates our online lives to an unprecedented extent and drives out its competitors.
At the end of the day, with its enormous scale, Google will have difficulty “not being evil”.
