• merc@sh.itjust.works
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    6 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.