

Googolopoly - wumi
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/15/one-startups-view-of-the-mighty-google/

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kul
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).

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wanorris
> 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.

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pxlpshr
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.

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TrevorJ
That's really nifty. Good way to make the point.

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wright
Why is Loopt the cheapest? PG says they are going to take over the world. They
have a deal with Boost Mobile.

~~~
rms
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.

<http://www.crunchbase.com/company/scribd>
<http://www.crunchbase.com/company/loopt>

