Google: 15 products with 500k users, yet we feel no choice
Scale as strategy; dominance as consequence.
Google: 15 products with 500k users, yet we feel no choice
When big becomes so big that competition ceases to exist.
Google has 15 products with more than 500,000 users. Gmail. Drive. Maps. YouTube (Alphabet subsidiary, but same holding). Hangouts. Docs. Sheets. Analytics. Adwords. AdSense. Search. Chrome. Android. Photos. Calendar. Translate.
That's fifteen different market positions. Dominant in each. Imagine if Philips was as dominant in bicycles, light bulbs, kitchens, hospital equipment and razors as Google is in each of these categories. We'd call it an antitrust monopoly. We'd say: this is unfair competition.
With Google we say: convenient. Your email is logged in, so Google knows who you are. Your Drive syncs with your email. Your Calendar integrates with your email. Your Docs are online, so Google knows what you write. Your Maps see where you are. Your Search integrates all that data. It's genius. It's also totalitarian.
Brad Stone writes in The Everything Store how Amazon did the same with products, not services. They started with books. Then music. Then video. Then hardware. Then cloud. Each time integration. Each time scale. Each time inevitable.
What happens here is what I call "integral dominance." It's not that Google is better at one thing. It's that Google has become so integral to your digital life that alternatives feel like loss. You don't want to switch from Gmail to Yahoo. You don't want to switch from Google Maps to Apple Maps. You don't want to.
But more: you can't. Or rather: you could, but you'd have to abandon all fifteen products simultaneously. That's not choice. That's hostage-taking by scale.
This is why antitrust investigations target Google. Not because Google is bad. Google is very good. That's exactly why it's dangerous. If you're better at everything, you don't eliminate competition by being better, you eliminate it by being integral.
In iRecord I see the same danger. Centralizing identity would be powerful. One system for all your verification. Employer, health, bank, government. All using the same biometric data, the same database. It would be efficient. It would also be the end of privacy.
That's why I build it differently. Decentralized. Local. You control your biometrics. Organizations don't need to dig into your data. They ask "are you Jacob?" and you prove it locally against your phone. SHA-256 hashing means nobody knows what your biometrics are. Not me. Not Google. Not your employer.
This is where tech needs to go. Not integral. Distributed. Not dominance. Interoperability.
Google won't do that. They make billions from integral dominance. Why would they?
That's why we have to do it ourselves.
Sources: Alphabet Inc. SEC filings and 10-K report (2024); Brad Stone, 'The Everything Store' (Little, Brown, 2013); FTC antitrust case documentation against Google
Source: Alphabet SEC filings Q4 2024; Brad Stone, 'The Everything Store' (Little, Brown, 2013)