Is Google the New Microsoft?

ericjones12398 writes "Google's come up with its solution for Dropbox: If you can't buy 'em, copy 'em. The search engine and online advertising giant replaced its popular Google Docs service with Google Drive, a cloud computing storage service designed to directly compete with start up Dropbox. This raises the question, has Google become the new Microsoft? Us ancient folk who remember the 1990s and the Microsoft anti-trust trial can certainly notice some parallels. A big, dare we say monolithic, company doesn't bother innovating on its own. It just waits for other companies to innovate, makes some changes for legally significant distinctions and enters into competition with the innovator. Sound familiar?

Comments

Let's just say

[PuercoPop]

That if Microsoft was a human and google a pig we wouldn't see much difference between the two

Re:Let's just say

[Katakaa]

Which is beside the point. Yes, you don't have to use Google. You don't have to use Windows either. But on top of that, Google does tons of secret things (secret to normal user). They track their movements around the web, via analytics and that is not known by normal person. Their business model is not obvious to a normal person. They hide most of their offerings behind cozy feel. Their stuff is free because the fee is hidden behind losing privacy and always getting advertising. Google is great at marketing, I give you that. That, however, doesn't make them any less gullible. In fact, it makes them worse. Everyone hates those phone marketers too. In this retrospective, Google really is the scum of the Internet.

Yes

[BasilBrush]

2002 I stopped using Microsoft.
2012 I stopped using Google.

Re:That depends...

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Google docs: File -> Download as -> Word, ODT, RDF, PDF, Text, HTML (Zipped)

I didn't ask whether you could download it as a Word DOC, I asked whether you could transfer it into another on-line office suite -- in other words, a direct competitor to Google Docs. And the short answer is no, at least not without converting via an intermediate format such as those you mentioned.

And Gmail support both POP3 and IMAP.. What else do you need?

Yes, I get it. You can download your mail, assuming you have some suitable tool that can then use it in that format.

But this doesn't help unless other competing tools actually can use it. Since you typically can't upload an entire existing mail archive to the major hosted webmail providers, it doesn't matter if you can download it from whichever one you picked first, you're still effectively locked in and there is a significant barrier to competition.

You can certainly argue that if the download lets you get some sort of standard mail archive but the other service doesn't support uploading that standard format then it's the receiving service's fault, but what is the standard format for downloading an entire archive from a hosted webmail service? Maybe with some combinations you can set up the receiving system to fetch everything via POP or IMAP from the originating system without ever downloading it locally, but how many people would even understand what that means, and how many of the major webmail providers allow this in practice?

Please remember that my fundamental point here is not to accuse Google of using proprietary formats, it's that Google don't need to use proprietary formats to achieve the same kind of lock-in if, in practice, most of their users can't figure out how to get their data into a competing service anyway.