Comment by Topfi

Both DuckDuckGo and Kagi are, purely focused on result quality in 2025 far better than Google currently, but that does not matter if one has no need beyond the most basic results.

And much of the MS Office suite is actually a worse copy of another product, merely copied and forced via network effect. There are more than enough far better alternatives to e.g. Teams and OneDrive. The latter even makes Excel far less reliable to the point of unusability.

Not to mention Windows is easily replaced for the truly average person who spends their entire computer use inside a Chromium browser nowadays. Outside PC Gaming (which is far from the average if we are honest), the vast majority of people never touch software that isn’t already on mobile or more likely exclusively in the browser.

Familiarity and brand strength, not need or compatibility, keep the customer facing offerings of MSFT going. That isn’t inherently unreasonable either, for these people Windows is fine as Chrome works well enough on it and they do not have any needs beyond that, so why switch. Same with search, Google still finds flights, restaurants, Wikipedia, etc.

Being better is worth little if the vast majority are sufficiently well catered to by the incumbent. Even if another OS or search may improve their experience somewhat (better reliability, longer battery life, etc.) that doesn’t trounce the established player as long as the few basics aren’t utterly broken even to them.

You can actively antagonize your users, be worse than the competition, more expensive too, you only loose most if you make the few things most have purely become reliant on and are expecting worse, basically regress.

Reason all the bugs in Windows are fine, after all the memories of most people are dominated by BSODs and just not crashing daily is enough to be considered pretty good, despite the overall experience far worse than most other OS/DE combis.

> Yahoo has shown that even with immense brand recognition people will still switch if the alternative is really better.

But it didn’t, Google users beyond a few initial super users who switched early on in the late nineties/early two thousands, track directly with the massive growth in new active web users. These new first time web users, far more than switching made up the growth between 2002-2006 that made Google dominant over Yahoo. It also should be kept in mind how much better Google was over Yahoo, whereas I am doubtful LLMs will have such deviations in quality, looks more like the opposite.

Point remains, OpenAI will, in my opinion, retain the strongest consumer share of LLMs, regardless of output quality, introduction of ads, etc.

This is not ecosystem lock in, it is solely branding. What do you think most have in mind when you mention search? What when it comes to online shopping? Now do the same for “AI”. Only one brand comes to mind for most.