Why is Google taking over everything?

Answer 1

Google's rise is a complicated phenomena. There are several factors which facilitate it.

1) anti-Microsoft rage and skepticism: Microsoft crushed its opposition in the early 90s and browser development remained inert for four years. Then in 2003 Microsoft suffered a series of data breaches and hacks against its code. Millions of computers crashed and their users lost all or most of their data. People became distrustful of Microsoft and looked for an alternative. Mozilla was the beneficiary of this distrust, but Google's advertising muscle helped it capitalize on the opening Mozilla created. There is also the small factor that Mozilla is a foundation, not a corporation, which frightens capitalists. Google seized on this fear, as well.
2) The failure of portals: search engines began trying to re-engineer themselves as content access points, putting things like news, for example, in people's faces when they just wanted to do a search. In the early 2000s Yahoo was the market leader and this was their strategy. Google perceived that it annoyed users and capitalized on this dissatisfaction.
3) Google's tradition of liberal business ethos enabled it to leverage leverage liberals and anti-US sentiment abroad to gain massive positive press. One magazine even compared them to God.

That Google has risen so fast is because it dominated the search market early on, and then used that dominance to amass a huge hoard of cash with which it bought up upstarts like itself and integrated their technology into their search algorithm. This dominance has also allowed it to leverage much of the online advertising industry, to the point that it feels its revenue is reliable. Then it offered invite-only beta products by leveraging liberals and anti-Americans (again), eventually integrating these into its search page, with the caveat that it used these products to cement its leader as search, rather than to compete in those markets. With its position as search leader cemented, the money comes in thick and heavy, and Google gets a share in the pie of most business done over the internet. With all that money they can enter pretty much any market they choose and offer a competitive, or even superior, offering, and with liberals and Europeans at their back they can make their competitors look bad or at least, not as "cool".

Google has been taking over for a while, but only recently has its influence began to be felt in a negative way. In particular, it is forcing inefficient and difficult web design on developers, thus making it very hard to make apps that access the local file system, for example. If you don't believe me, wait till Sept, when your browser add-ons stop working because people couldn't hardly figure out how to update them.... What are the alternatives? Mozilla is on Google's payroll, now, and Microsoft is so conservative in its business practices that many users don't trust them. Google's open-source web browser technology has allowed it to thwart competitors in more subtle way, like for example Opera which recently declared it would stop developing its own technology and use Google's. When you look at where the money is, the browser market is clearly dipolar with Google in the lead.

So why is Google taking over? Because we let it.