this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2026
426 points (98.0% liked)
Technology
86814 readers
3884 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
And Google built a search engine. Everything else they've tried to build has failed, other than maybe Gmail which was just a Yahoo Mail / Hotmail clone. Everything else that has been successful has been an acquisition: Maps (Keyhole), YouTube, Android, Google Photos (Picasa), Doubleclick...
We really need robust antitrust. How many of these acquisitions would be thriving companies in their own right, competing with the big tech giants if the tech giants hadn't been able to absorb them.
Google+ is an example of what happens when companies have to compete instead of acquiring other companies. Google poured billions into it and it flopped completely.
just wanted to add to the list that google bought writely and immediately started making it worse as google docs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalyr
IMO it’s almost worse than if G+ flopped completely. Google+ was actually awesome for the specific world of smalltime pen and paper RPGs. But of course, that one creative community of people designing & publishing cool stuff wasn’t enough to justify its cost, or challenge Facebook for supremacy, so they pulled the plug even though plenty of people were still using it. Just a waste.
If it takes multiple billions of dollars to create a product that is useful for a niche group of pen and paper RPG players, that product is probably not going to succeed.
But, also, if Facebook didn't have such an unassailable monopoly on social networking, small, focused social networks that targeted a niche group of people might have a chance of surviving.