I’d think employee productivity and retention would be high on the list.
Likewise as a recent founder myself the fact that I’ve been able to start a company with no office and have the flexibility to hire people from anywhere in the country is a game changer.
If big old fashion companies want to make people work in person, it’s basically just a gift for smaller competitors ready to eat their lunch.
It’s utterly uncontroversial to state that Google search has gone to shit in the last few years.
Now, the question to ask is if Google wasn’t paying off other companies to make them the default would they have been more incentivized to make a better search experience?
At this point I don’t get any better results from Google than DuckDuckGo/Bing. A few years ago Google was better, now they are increasingly useless and no better than competitors.
If iOS users got a prompt to choose a search engine the first time they open Safari, and the order of choices was random, how many would even notice the results were different in any way?
There are folks in my life who aren't comfortable with computers and either wouldn't know that changing the default search engine was even possible, or wouldn't feel comfortable with going into the settings because they would be afraid of breaking something.
I think you’re missing the point about antitrust and competition. It’s about abusing your power to prevent potential competitors from competing on the merits. Paying to be a default means hardly anybody will ever see your competitors product.
If everybody was able to easily see Google’s results vs competitors it’s likely they would try harder and wouldn’t have just spent all their effort on cramming more ads above the results.
Unfortunately not trying hard isn’t illegal. Paying for placement is not illegal either, that’s pretty much what advertising is. And what Google will argue, in the case of websearch, is that the problem is hard which is what drives your perception that they have failed to maintain quality and switching is trivially easy, but no one does because.. the competition is worse. I daily drive Bing and in aggregate it’s approximately the same level of bad as google.
If you were to address the online advertising market, we would have a lot more to agree on. But you didn’t, and the article seems a bit confused about the ongoing cases (search filed in 2021 vs ads filed recently) and IMO is mostly written to rile the proles.
I literally did some web dev work on my Samsung Chromebook Series 5 550 (released 2012) last week. It's running linux[1] at this point (since it's EOL), and is a little slow, but it's still perfectly functional for running vscode and a local webserver. (As others have pointed out, browsing the rest of the bloated web is a pain, though)
To be fair, with all the money the government wastes this taxpayer would be quite happy to have more resources devoted to this mixed probability/extremely high impact issue.
One of my favorite examples of the benefits of public interest spending and investment. There very likely wouldn’t be an ARM today if it weren’t for the Micro.
Eh, who knows really? Having something in the lab that works and getting a product team to understand how to make it useful to customers aren’t the same problem.
In some sense I’ve always thought Apple is focused so much on reliability and deterministic approaches that wrapping their heads around probabilistic outcomes is harder than for other companies.
Likewise as a recent founder myself the fact that I’ve been able to start a company with no office and have the flexibility to hire people from anywhere in the country is a game changer.
If big old fashion companies want to make people work in person, it’s basically just a gift for smaller competitors ready to eat their lunch.