Google arouses envy, hatred and trust, and it can be destroyed

Alphabet Inc.’s Google has few peers in the world of success. Founded on September 4, 1998, it currently has a market capitalization of $1.98 trillion.

It is global, envied, admired, and relied upon as the primary search engine. It is also hated. According to Google (yes, I Googled it), it has 92% of the search market. Its name has entered the English language as a noun (Google) and a verb (to Google).

It has also absorbed so much of the world’s advertising that it has become one of the main instruments of humiliating and partially destroying the media supported by advertising, from local newspapers to the big publishing and television names. All of them are suffering, and many of them have gone bankrupt, especially local radio and newspapers.

Google was the brainchild of two Stanford students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. In its short history, it has changed the world.

When it first appeared, it began to outpace existing search engines, simply because it was better, more flexible, surprisingly easy to use, and could generate an answer just by typing a few words into a query.

There were seven major search engines competing for market share at the time: Yahoo, Alta Vista, Excite, Lycos, WebCrawler, Ask Jeeves, and Netscape. There were a dozen or so others on the market.

Since its initial success, Google — like its tech giant, Amazon — has grown beyond imagination.

Google continued to expand, continually buying other technology companies. According to its search engine, Google has bought 256 smaller high-tech companies.

The question is: Is this a good thing? Is Google’s strategy to find talent and great new businesses, or to stifle potential rivals?

In my opinion, a bit of each. He has acquired a lot of talent through acquisitions, but many promising companies and their nascent products and services may never reach their potential under Google. They will die in the corporate weeds.

During its acquisition spree, Google changed the nature of tech startups. When Google itself first started, it was a time when startups made people rich by going public and proving their worth to the market. Now there’s a new dynamic in tech startup financing: Venture capitalists asking if Google will buy a startup. Society has no chance of making money. Innovators have become the farm teams of giants.