Comment by agentultra
4 hours ago
> 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.
The top people at these companies don't spend all day building useful products, they have entire teams of people working strategy and looking at numbers to ensure their foothold in the various markets stays air tight and free of any real competition. The simplest example of this is the "switch your search engine back to Google" pop-up that effectively encourages users to switch back to Google if their default search engine changed via installing an extension.