• randomaside@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    10 months ago

    It’s been an unsupportable business model from the beginning. Other than android, everything Google makes is easily replaceable by some other product. They don’t have a monopoly like any of their competition that will easily sustain them. I honestly don’t believe the majority of Google Engineers actually do anything innovative anymore as most of those people left the company when their pet projects were shut down in the first round of cost cutting measures (around the time Google became Alphabet).

      • pixelscript@lemmy.ml
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        10 months ago

        Supposedly a deeply unprofitable one. Which is a huge chunk of why no real competition has surfaced.

        It’s one thing to set up a proverbial store with prices so low you choke out the competition. It’s another thing to essentially pay your customers to come in, either by literally paying them or by providing a service that they pay below actual cost for.

        • bigkahuna1986@lemmy.ml
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          10 months ago

          Supposedly a deeply unprofitable one.

          That’s probably why it’s getting enshittified so quickly.

          • Kidplayer_666@lemm.ee
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            10 months ago

            Everything is replaceable if people want to. The problem is the inertia it takes to substitute it

            • lud@lemm.ee
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              10 months ago

              YouTube is really hard to replace without the money of a multi billion company.

              Video is hard and attracting creators is even harder.

              • Kidplayer_666@lemm.ee
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                10 months ago

                So is a good search engine. As much as I love DuckDuckGo and daily drive it the results are much worse than google’s

                • lud@lemm.ee
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                  10 months ago

                  No, you can switch to a different search engine right now and the results will be perfectly fine. I use DDG exclusively.

                  What video platform can you switch to that has even remotely close to the amount of content as YouTube? (Pornhub doesn’t count)

                • bramblepatchmystery@slrpnk.net
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                  10 months ago

                  The only benefit I get from google over ecosia or duckduckgo is I can’t call a company or view their menu immediately from the search page after looking them up.

        • narp@feddit.de
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          10 months ago

          Copilot/Bing Search might put a big dent in that in the future. People will just ask an AI instead of “googling”.

    • merc@sh.itjust.works
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      10 months ago

      They don’t have a monopoly like any of their competition that will easily sustain them.

      Erm, you think Bing is a serious competitor? Aside from search (91.54% of the global search market), Google is part of an ads duopoly that is only stalled by walled gardens like Amazon, TikTok, Wal*Mart, and the various entertainment companies. There’s also Google Maps, used by 77% of users between 16 and 64, and their biggest non-iOS competitor is Waze, which Google also owns. For email, 75% of the US email market is dominated by Gmail. As for the user-generated media market, YouTube absolutely dominates that. The closest competitor (Twitch, A.K.A. Amazon) is far behind.

      As for what Google engineers do, it’s mostly not rip-things-up-and-start-over innovation since these are all very mature markets with billions of users. Instead it’s small tweaks that generate hundreds of millions in savings or additional revenue.