Ppl here are basically complaining about the free market.
Google is big because they have created a ton of value. If they were rubbish/didn't create value, then they wouldn't be big and wouldn't buy other companies.
At least they did it by having the best product (unlike MS).
> At least they did it by having the best product (unlike MS).
Microsoft fell into the DOS monopoly because they were effective at business and Digital Research (the more obvious vendor) wasn't.
Windows won because Apple (by choice or by failure) didn't succeed at beating PCs with the Mac and because they executed better than other choices for transitioning away from DOS (OS/2 in particular, but also notably GeoWorks). OS/2 was the inside-track solution that failed because it was too closed -- Windows was the comparatively open solution (because it ran on all PC-compatibles) that beat it.
Office won because it was a genuinely better product in a GUI than Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, and other competitors. Word and Excel had been honed on the Mac for years as the overwhelming leader in the word processing and spreadsheet markets there.
Microsoft is not a company that got to be as enormous as they did due to one lucky break early on. They did it by building products that lots of people liked, by making smart business decisions, and by being the toughest competitor to face.
> Google is big because they have created a ton of value.
Google is a smart company that got off to a start with brilliant technology in a form lots of people love. But now that they are big, they have a lot of the same advantages Microsoft had in the 90s.
Would Google Apps really have vastly more mindshare than alternatives like Zoho purely on the product merits? Google is now in the stage where they can become one of the leaders in a market simply by announcing a product. This pretty much puts them where Microsoft was in 1995. That may be the free market, but if you're competing with them, it's pretty frustrating to know that even if you beat them hands down on product desireability, they can still win in the market just by being Google.
Waving the free market flag and complaining about MS in the same comment is contradictory. Sure, I'll concede that MS products aren't the best products out there, but customers decide what has the most value. Here are some of the ways that MSFT products, while possibly technically inferior, created value:
-hardware didn't matter. DOS/Windows would run on any (sufficiently powerful) PC
-everyone had it, so it was already familiar (people value consistency)
-MSFT on a PC has always been cheaper than a Mac, and people valued the stuff they could buy with the difference more than they valued the qualities of a Mac
-there has always been more software for Windows. This matters less now because of virtualization and the internet, but this was a big deal in the 80s and 90s.
-the money they spent on marketing and bizdev made their products easier to buy
Google scares me...
and upsets...
yet they bring me a lot of utility... love/hate.
I wish they'd focus on fixing and improving their existing services, instead of gobbling everything up before it has a chance to live in a competitive market and mature. For as big as they are, they do a terrible job of buttoning up their projects.
Presumably the two YC companies there have the smallest valuations of the companies on the board, but are representative YC companies that raised Series A's. Loopt should be more expensive than Scribd though, they've raised four times as much funding.
Google is big because they have created a ton of value. If they were rubbish/didn't create value, then they wouldn't be big and wouldn't buy other companies.
At least they did it by having the best product (unlike MS).