I'm sorry but this is what bothers me the most about unregulated capitalism. You are discounting the massive advantage Google and other corporations have which they have accumulated over the years in the form of:
* IP and patents
* Actual employees and knowledge capital
* Actual working designs and infrastructure
* Brand recognition
* Amount of businesses that rely on them
If you say that a new startup can just start building a computer to rival the iMac, for example, you're missing the 1000 little things that go into it. Sure, your competitor might have a more open operating system, say. But it won't have the agreements with chip manufacturers. It won't have the "retina" displays, or other technology that Apple has accumulated over the years.
At some point, the giant corporations just have too much for a startup to defeat. That's why most startups are basically picking off one little part and then the corporations buy them. It used to be that NEW technology was where startups were able to expand while old players couldn't adapt fast enough. For example, Microsoft was still small when the PC software revolution came about. However, now with "moonshots" and ambitious VC activity, the corporations have set up quite a few obstacles to that happening anymore.
* IP and patents
* Actual employees and knowledge capital
* Actual working designs and infrastructure
* Brand recognition
* Amount of businesses that rely on them
All of those things competitors like Microsoft had. There was still room for Google to rise. Microsoft is playing catch up with search and now IE. Google is trying to catch up with social, and even in the social place, there was a hashtag for Twitter overlayed on A Christmas Story yesterday.
there's also behavioral patterns people develop "I'll just google it" and the simplicity of picking the biggest entity for people who arn't interested in technology.
People arn't rational, and even if google is filtering out political sites performing propaganda through omission, there will be a huge population of people that either wouldn't hear about it, or wouldn't care.
Using Google as a verb (ie. "just google it") is actually behavior the company discourages, or at least used too. It severely devalues the brand by generalizing the term. For example, do you really go shopping for Kleenex or do you just go buy the facial tissue you prefer, or is on sale, while referring to it as Kleenex?
The fear is "just google it" becoming synonymous with search - even if that search occurs on Bing, etc.
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I'm sorry but this is what bothers me the most about unregulated capitalism. You are discounting the massive advantage Google and other corporations have which they have accumulated over the years in the form of:
If you say that a new startup can just start building a computer to rival the iMac, for example, you're missing the 1000 little things that go into it. Sure, your competitor might have a more open operating system, say. But it won't have the agreements with chip manufacturers. It won't have the "retina" displays, or other technology that Apple has accumulated over the years.At some point, the giant corporations just have too much for a startup to defeat. That's why most startups are basically picking off one little part and then the corporations buy them. It used to be that NEW technology was where startups were able to expand while old players couldn't adapt fast enough. For example, Microsoft was still small when the PC software revolution came about. However, now with "moonshots" and ambitious VC activity, the corporations have set up quite a few obstacles to that happening anymore.
IP and patents are not "unregulated capitalism" they are actually political creations enforced by a legal regime.
ok, but even without these things the corporation has a massive head start and exclusive connections
even if it's not with governments, it's with other corporations
don't forget giant legal teams
there's also behavioral patterns people develop "I'll just google it" and the simplicity of picking the biggest entity for people who arn't interested in technology.
People arn't rational, and even if google is filtering out political sites performing propaganda through omission, there will be a huge population of people that either wouldn't hear about it, or wouldn't care.
The free market doesn't fix everything.
Using Google as a verb (ie. "just google it") is actually behavior the company discourages, or at least used too. It severely devalues the brand by generalizing the term. For example, do you really go shopping for Kleenex or do you just go buy the facial tissue you prefer, or is on sale, while referring to it as Kleenex?
The fear is "just google it" becoming synonymous with search - even if that search occurs on Bing, etc.
You changed my opinion on this. Google needs to fix the page rank algorithm.