What would be the long-term impact on the internet and society if Google were to completely fail?
What would be the long-term impact on the internet and society if Google were to completely fail?
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.
121More 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.
45Second 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 😉
24They absolutely would be bailed out. No question.
36it 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 soon6
I don't think a company as big as Google could die without a couple months notice. I think most companies would go to special lengths to get their users to setup alternatives. Gmail accounts would get flooded with "hey since Gmail is going away don't forget to change your login preferences, we'll force you to add a new email next time you login". And there would be a massive number of memes like when gpdr took effect.
It would certainly be a chaotic and annoying time, but I think most vital services wouldn't be so bad and Microsoft would grab a nice little monopoly on office apps again.
Google cloud hosting would be way worse though.
10When I read the post I was initially focused on google search but man….if gmail were to die, the pile-on effects would be seriously catastrophic and it would take a very long time for things to stabilize again. It’s not just personal emails that are handled by gmail - their corporate offerings are used by a ton of companies, and there are plenty of school districts as well that rely on it for their email (and thus associated logins). If you’ve ever worked near education, you know what a cluster that would be as all the IT departments scrambled to figure out who would be responsible for a migration.
I don’t really see it happening, but it’s very scary to think about what would happen if gmail were to fall.
4I think it is unlikely that they would do down without selling there users. So Gmail would become Hotmail, Google drive would become Dropbox and so on.
3even if a meteor hits and wipe out one side of Earth, google(or any big tech's) data centers around the world would still be functional.
2
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.
41They could switch to LibreOffice, OnlyOffice, or Collabora and there are plenty of other free e-mail providers.
It would take some time and effort to get everything switched over though.4
Permanently Deleted
27At this point it would not fail, it may be relegated by a newer service, like IBM and Xerox gave way to Microsoft and Apple. The big old corporations are still there, but they are not what they were in the 1980s.
Or if there was a big technology shift to something they have not yet mastered they could be made irrelevant, but still exist like Kodak.
They are too big to fail unless it is by their own failure to adapt or bad financial decisions (look at Blockbuster, Borders and Polaroid).
18look at Blockbuster, Borders and Polaroid
To your point, those all took like a decade to become obsolete and go out of business.
10
A significant amount of trade skill knowledge and examples are tied up in YouTube. Does anyone remember building a deck before YT? You would go to the library, make copies of books or magazines that had a general idea on how to do it, then you would try to do it yourself and things would go wrong constantly.
There’s a lot of this type of stuff that would simply be lost. It’s not unusual to find videos from 15 years ago that are still relevant today.
14Why 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.
13As 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.
8
It'd be very very bad for schools in the US in rural areas. There's no way they'd be able to afford equivalent services to what Google offers them for basically free, ever again. Many children would lose their assignments to Google Drive and others would be sad from losing what's basically a time capsule of their entire life that was stored in there.
Another loss would be Android, and the Google Play Store. So many phones would basically become waste overnight. It'd be absolutely tragic. At least that's the way I see it.
Most less technically literate folks would lose their ability to use their computers overnight. They'd go to Chrome to make a google search to go to their favorite website, and when they see the page showing that Google cannot be found, they'd just assume their computer is broken. Microsoft would be the 'saviour' in this. I'm sure they'd happily push out an update for Windows that resets your default browser to Microsoft Edge (again) and your default search engine to Bing.
Later down the road, whoever buys the old Google domains would likely be able to spread some sick malware and steal a lot of data from people who didn't prepare properly.
That's just what I can immediately think of. I'm sure there's more, or something worse I forgot about. Haha.
10The Android Open Source Project and all of its resources wouldn't go anywhere, it would just lose its biggest parasite.
7
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.
8I 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.
3Docs 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.
3Google reaps a more than simply healthy profit compared to what it outlays to help open source projects. Alphabet is not doing this out of altruism so it's definitely profit motivated. Google's cash outlay to benefit FOSS is mere peanuts when compared to the lucrative value it gets in return.
2
I'd prefer not to leave Apple with pretty much no competition in mobile OS if Android were to fail, unless we're just referring to Google the search engine, and not the parent company Alphabet.
2I dream of a world that again exists without big tech, but you know, it's a dream.
2Yes, I feel you on that one!
1
It really depends on how much time people would have to migrate data and swap email accounts. If it's years, we would probably be fine although the financial and data loss would be still be incalculable.
If we didn't have much or any time to migrate.... I don't even want to think about it. If email accounts suddenly got shut down many people would lose banking access, among many other things. It would probably cause a global recession if I had to guess (talking out my ass on this one but I wouldn't be surprised).
6Think of how many companies use gsuite for their entire operation, or how many services are hosted entirely in Google cloud, too
4
As of today it wouldn’t be that hard, alternatives are available and some of them are as good but don’t have the same market share.
5Online advertising would take a big hit, lots of small businesses would struggle until other advertising companies (Meta, Twitter, whatever, smaller website analytics products) take over and direct customers to them. Major international businesses would probably sit one out wait until the market has resettled itself (like we're seeing with Twitter right now).
Lots of search engines would try to capture a piece of the pie.
4Right now? Bad. Other Big Tech would swoop in and tech their place and try and take their proprietary market share, but a lot of the open source work would be left to die on the vine, including Firefox. It would be a loss of paid talent in the FOSS world and a massive consolidation of big tech.
3Online advertising would take a big hit, lots of small businesses would struggle until other advertising companies (Meta, Twitter, whatever, smaller website analytics products) take over and direct customers to them. Major international businesses would probably sit one out wait until the market has resettled itself (like we're seeing with Twitter right now).
Lots of search engines would try to capture a piece of the pie.
3I don't see a scenario where google or the likes would be allowed to fail. So moot point.
Hypothetically it would open a window for open source services to sneak in.
2Microsoft is already ahead with Bing, Ai, and Cortana. Google is an ad mess currently especially with it largest social media content websites in flux.
1Minimal. You might see a few arms races to fill the vacuum but the end result of that competition would probably be better than what we have now.
1I like your optimism. Even though I'm far from sharing it.
2
I’d have to get a new email account for junk.
1