Long term? Minimal. All the niches it fills, have alternatives that would just grow to fill them in.
Short term? Catastrophic. Losing GMail and “login with Google” would leave a lot of people with no email, no way to login to other services, and no way to recover their passwords (through email). The loss of Photo backups would also upset many, Drive and Docs would leave a lot of people and businesses without their daily tools. Search would likely be the less affected, with plenty of alternatives already to pick from.
More catastrophic than any of that would be the loss of Google Cloud Platform. A huge amount of the Internet runs on Google cloud platform, millions of businesses, even Spotify and Twitter are hosted on Google cloud platform. So unless they have a hybrid-cloud strategy, which I can guarantee for 99.99999% they do not, then a huge section of the Internet and business in general goes down.
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Second question would the US gov consider google “to big to fail” and just inject a ton of money to restore it (or give enought time to break it up)?
Kinda curious 😉
They absolutely would be bailed out. No question.
it is far more likely that when the time comes google will buy us government, than the other way around :D
this headline was making rounds in 2011
Apple now has more cash than the U.S. government
according to this, alphabet has over 100b of cashcash reserve. i don’t think they are going bankrupt anytime soonBuying the government (if doing so was even possible) means they need to furnish it’s debts.
Even if a company was willing to to undertake such a burden, nobody makes more money than the government, it just doesn’t have much reason to hold onto any of the cash it collects.
Besides, they can just print more.
Edit: that’s not to say it isn’t hilarious
Buying the government is so easy. You can get a politician in your pocket for a only few grand.
I wonder how much the Federal Reserve printer costs.
Asking for a friend that wants to make an infinite % return on investment.
You can stop by the Federal Reserve and pick one up
It would be worse than the burning of the library of Alexandria. So much data stored on Youtube, Gdrive, Google Photos, Gmail etc etc etc would be lost forever, without backups for probably most of it.
The Internet Archive and some US agency (I think it was the NSA) have backups for a lot of the public-facing data. But lots of data would simply be lost media forever as well.
I wonder tho, if some artworks that have been saved only on Google servers, will live on solely through AI algorithms, that have included these in their datasets.
Google will never die, at least not all at once. If Google were to die sometime in the future, it would die a very slow death, with all there side-businesses being slowly sold off one by one. Plenty of time to switch to alternatives and to save all your important data (which you should probably do always regardless)
Really, really bad for nonprofits, including schools and health centers, that rely on Google Workspace (Gmail, Docs, etc) for providing MS Office-type software for cheap or even free. And these organizations are usually understaffed in terms of IT, so it would take them a long time to get back on their feet.
Honestly, this would be a good things.
How do you figure?
There would be some initial shock but we would quickly get over it. Personally, I would be delighted if Google were to do a complete epic fail and close down.
I think you’re under estimating the importance of Google on the internet. Sure if search were to fail we’d find a way, in a probably worse off over all internet.
Google also provides gdocs. The only good competitor to Microsoft office. Tons of businesses are extremely reliant on gdocs. It’s cloud base infra would make it’s loss more painful than the loss of ms office. We’d also lose drive, which is heavily integrated into a lot of web apps.
We’d lose their support on android. While android would survive it would he a detriment to the software. Especially future features. As well as it’s tight integration with non phone devices.
Google is a major funder of a long list of FOSS applications. It would seriously damage FOSS software.
Google runs YouTube.
Docs is the easiest thing to replace, honestly. It’s good, but there are so many alternatives. Sheets, however, as a connected collaborative spreadsheet is harder to replace. Excel is terrible online and tools like Airtable are too cooked for most people.
Why do people here think it would just “disappear” one day? If Google is to fail it would be a years-long process and everyone would have plenty of time to migrate from their services.
I was able to de-google is a matter of months. Btw if you are reading this post please consider moving away from Gmail now.
As you said, it’s exceedingly unlikely that Google would just disappear one day. AOL still exists. Yahoo still exists. These large companies don’t disappear generally, they just become shadows of their former selves and reasonably attractive acquisition targets. And in that event, there’d be ample notice for everyone to switch to alternatives. If, for the sake of argument, Google were to actually disappear immediately, it implies something very bad has happened in the world.
