That is just blatant lying. I can not see how interoperability of the current products - like showing business information on a map - would suddenly become impossible. It may become more expensive for Google, or more accessible to other companies providing map services. I guess "your business may be shown on the map in other services besides Google" is not as convincing, though.
If I may, on topic of Google, serious degradation of the provided search capability in the last 10 years has taken place for those seeking information. Really, the transformation is all but complete and it's now a marketplace, with commercial results always taking priority. Then again Facebook has nearly killed off Internet forums and the structured information they provided, so there is less information to find. We did get Groups with no structure and information that may be deleted at any given time for whatever reason in exchange for the forums, though.
Perhaps this is just another case of "old man yells at cloud" when society inevitably progresses. I would just like to use a search engine that helps me find what I actually want, not what they want me to find.
GOOGLE SHOULD BE BROKEN UP INTO A THOUSAND PIECES AND THE OWNERS PUT IN JAIL. NO COMPANY SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO DO BUSINESS AND NOT HAVE CUSTOMER SERVICE BY TELEPHONE
This is a very old conflict. IBM had a natural monopoly on some parts of computing as early as 1920, because IBM equipment was simply better than the competition. The Government Printing Office tried to undercut IBM's prices by building its own tabulators and sorters, but other parts of the government wouldn't buy the cheaper government products. Downtime is far more expensive than a discount on initial purchase prices, and the Printing Office products WEREN'T fully compatible with IBM machines and cards, and didn't come with the same degree of competent service.
Later in 1969 the government tried a plain antitrust action, using the dubious grounds that IBM forced its users to take IBM's bundled software. The case ran on and on until 1982, when the government finally gave up.
Google has a natural monopoly on searching. Nothing else works nearly as well. Other Google products aren't especially superior, and many of them have failed. Owning one niche doesn't protect other niches.
The real solution is obvious. Walk over to your wall, pull out a male electrical cord from the socket, and look at the plug. That design (either 2-prong ungrounded or 3-prong grounded) became standard in the 1930s and 40s because of bipartisan pressure to end "closed ecosystems" (as we call them today) in electrical technology and components, and the insurance industry's founding of the Underwriters Laboratory (UL) to test all such equipment in a standard way to satisfy all insurers that what they were insuring was safe.
Facebook has already let the cat out of the bag by calling for portable social media data formats in its announcement of its new incarnation, Meta. Common, third-party data standards and application programming interfaces (APIs) are already out there. They were widely talked about in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. But the rise of the quasi-monopolistic tech giants and the highly centralized "platforms" (if I hear that word one more time as a defense of the current market structure, I'll reach for my water pistol) since around 2007 has led us down the wrong path.
The Internet and Web were rolled out to the public in the 1990s very much in this "common standards" spirit, not a handful of oligopolists carving up market share. The rhetoric of "stick with and defend our closed ecosystem, or else" is bullsh*t.
That is just blatant lying. I can not see how interoperability of the current products - like showing business information on a map - would suddenly become impossible. It may become more expensive for Google, or more accessible to other companies providing map services. I guess "your business may be shown on the map in other services besides Google" is not as convincing, though.
If I may, on topic of Google, serious degradation of the provided search capability in the last 10 years has taken place for those seeking information. Really, the transformation is all but complete and it's now a marketplace, with commercial results always taking priority. Then again Facebook has nearly killed off Internet forums and the structured information they provided, so there is less information to find. We did get Groups with no structure and information that may be deleted at any given time for whatever reason in exchange for the forums, though.
Perhaps this is just another case of "old man yells at cloud" when society inevitably progresses. I would just like to use a search engine that helps me find what I actually want, not what they want me to find.
Google Maps is terrible. It seems to pick insane routes, without fail. Break 'em up. Govern already.
GOOGLE SHOULD BE BROKEN UP INTO A THOUSAND PIECES AND THE OWNERS PUT IN JAIL. NO COMPANY SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO DO BUSINESS AND NOT HAVE CUSTOMER SERVICE BY TELEPHONE
This is a very old conflict. IBM had a natural monopoly on some parts of computing as early as 1920, because IBM equipment was simply better than the competition. The Government Printing Office tried to undercut IBM's prices by building its own tabulators and sorters, but other parts of the government wouldn't buy the cheaper government products. Downtime is far more expensive than a discount on initial purchase prices, and the Printing Office products WEREN'T fully compatible with IBM machines and cards, and didn't come with the same degree of competent service.
Here's a 1926 report on the action:
https://books.google.com/books?id=s4LzO7bDRkwC
Later in 1969 the government tried a plain antitrust action, using the dubious grounds that IBM forced its users to take IBM's bundled software. The case ran on and on until 1982, when the government finally gave up.
Google has a natural monopoly on searching. Nothing else works nearly as well. Other Google products aren't especially superior, and many of them have failed. Owning one niche doesn't protect other niches.
The real solution is obvious. Walk over to your wall, pull out a male electrical cord from the socket, and look at the plug. That design (either 2-prong ungrounded or 3-prong grounded) became standard in the 1930s and 40s because of bipartisan pressure to end "closed ecosystems" (as we call them today) in electrical technology and components, and the insurance industry's founding of the Underwriters Laboratory (UL) to test all such equipment in a standard way to satisfy all insurers that what they were insuring was safe.
Facebook has already let the cat out of the bag by calling for portable social media data formats in its announcement of its new incarnation, Meta. Common, third-party data standards and application programming interfaces (APIs) are already out there. They were widely talked about in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. But the rise of the quasi-monopolistic tech giants and the highly centralized "platforms" (if I hear that word one more time as a defense of the current market structure, I'll reach for my water pistol) since around 2007 has led us down the wrong path.
The Internet and Web were rolled out to the public in the 1990s very much in this "common standards" spirit, not a handful of oligopolists carving up market share. The rhetoric of "stick with and defend our closed ecosystem, or else" is bullsh*t.