Comment by jxcole

> If many people hated their products, they wouldn't use them

This might be true in a true, free market without monopolistic collusion and the abandonment of antitrust regulation and enforcement in the US.

In many cases people don’t switch to something else because there isn’t an alternative. Or because they don’t know how to change the defaults that come installed on their computer. Or they get a big scary warning if they figure it out and try.

I would have a hard time believing anyone who said Google was competing fairly and not juicing their numbers with Gemini. Like with search and ads, they have a lot of vested interest in profits and little regard for much else. There’s no reason to. Almost all safeguards on corporate behaviour have been taken off in the last bunch of years.

Google jumped at renaming Lake Ontario.

Of course they’re going to shove AI mode as the default on search and claim every user loves it.

GP said Google Search is dead, in a way, not Google itself. Google is just to an overwhelmingly part an ad business at this point. And people hate their annoying ads. So people hate Google search, and Google ads. Basically, the majority of what Google is.

> If many people hated their products, they wouldn't use them. If they didn't use them they would not be financially successful.

I think this incorrect diminishes the success of product lock-in and also doesn't consider that the world is moving more and more into concentrated wealth where consumers have less and less to offer. Google's financial success could be sustained or even continue to grow with fewer ad buyers targeting fewer people.

> Google is not dying just because you personally have a feeling the results are worse than before and there is no definition of dying that would be consistent with Google's current state.

Again, "dying" is being used as a proxy for financial success. I don't disagree that Google/Microsoft/Meta will continue to grow their revenue or even profit, but I do argue that their products are becoming worse for consumers. That may or may not lead to real competitors, but that is a whole other regulatory capture discussion.

> If Google were to die they would die the way Yahoo did, because a competitor was demonstrably better than them and everyone switched off.

I think you mean "die" here in a product/usage sense, which I think their current path seems to be going that way, but I think it will matter FAR less to Google/Alphabet than it did too Yahoo.

> If Google were to die they would die the way Yahoo did

This might be true 20 years ago where Google had one true product, Search. Since then, they have diversified and got their fingers a million pies.

I don’t think you can get true competition with the way MS,GOOG,AMZ have grown. You’ll get a duopoly, or maybe a triopoly.

You must not talk to a lot of retired people, for whom every tech product is a bewildering nightmare.

> If many people hated their products, they wouldn't use them

You do understand how drugs work right?