this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2023
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Asklemmy
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My vote goes to Google, to whom I am tightly married. It's ecosystem and interconnectivity between apps as well as devices is unbeatable. It's super reliant.
It's the one entity that can wreck my online and offline presence. I mean, I use android and Google to login everywhere. If Mr. Google so decrees, my phone could wipe and google account be gone tomorrow. Same applies to Apple and Microsoft, but I don't use their systems as much. The poison I picked is Google and I hate it.
I feel like I don't use that many Google services (mostly because I'm not convinced they won't shut down), but the ones I do use are the ones that would really suck to lose access to. I realized this a few months ago and have at least been working on moving my email away from Gmail to my own domain since that is the critical one that could screw everything up.
I moved to protonmail years ago for this reason, but then my friend gave me a free paid YouTube account so I created a new Gmail account and found a new love for heavy metal. Since then the algorithm has learnt my tastes so well I would be devastated to lose my account, but I made a pact with myself that if my friend ever decided to ditch her account that I wouldn't pay for my own. So I'm totally at the mercy of her whims, and she doesn't even know!
In the last months I tried to cut as many Google services as I could. I use the Proton suite now, it's nice.
Unfortunately I still heavily rely on them for Android phone and TVs... Not to mention YouTube, which is yet to have a good competitor.
I doubt we'll ever see competition to Youtube. It has reached the point where they will basically have to be antitrusted like AT&T to see a competitor.
I don't even know if YouTube will be around in 30 years, let alone not have competitors.
All gigantic businesses think they're too big and entrenched and used every day to fail, until they do. Just look at Yahoo! as one example from recent memory.
So, we'll see, I suppose!
In the end I am just a dummy on the internet speculating. For all I know climate change will be coming down from the top rope and take Google with it.
I mean...you're probably right. But there's a little part of me that thinks...they said the same thing about Facebook, that it wouldn't last five years, that it would go the way of MySpace and something else would jump in, but... it's been just a few months shy of 20 years now, and even though it's not the juggernaut it used to be, it's entrenched in a way I never expected.
And then there's, like, GE, which is 130 years old...or Cigna, Remington, Citi, or Chase, which are older. Some others, like AT&T, do a little dance and come back...I dunno. Some companies just have staying power (in the case of Cigna, I think it might be a pact with some unholy abomination). And they're all still dominating or at least leading their respective markets.
Even your example, Yahoo, while certainly not the cultural force it once was, is still around in a slightly different incarnation. Nothing ever really dies, it seems.
Sent from my pixel 6