As is the nature of dualities, the web has benefit immensely from Google's investments even if it would have chartered a different (and in your opinion, a better) course had Google not existed in the first place. Someone pointed out, you couldn't say the same for Amazon. As for incompetence: imho, webrtc, which Google standardized and open sourced, is likely the single most important innovation on the interwebs (in terms of impact) just ahead of Microsoft's XMLHttpRequest.
Thats a really weird claim. We can point to some real ways google has benefited the web: Their search engine is excellent, and was a huge leap forward when it was released. SPDY/QUIC are set to become the next HTTP2/HTTP3. And google chrome has made the browser a much more powerful and compelling platform over the last few years. If anything they're investing too much - and hurting the web by making it hard for other browser vendors to keep up.
But webrtc?? Webrtc is still mostly a toy, barely used outside of video conferencing. Its insanely overcomplicated for any other use case. And I still haven't seen a compelling reason to use it for anything else. Decentralized communication doesn't buy you much when the site itself is still loaded from a centralized server.
More important / impactful than XMLHttpRequest? No, I think not.
RedHat benefited significantly from funding by large corporations in it's early days.
Undoubtedly these companies helped shape the Linux ecosystem. A single company doesn't control it, but as big as Google is a single company doesn't control the web either.
To be fair, I am not the one that's assuming things here. I am speaking of how Google has indeed contributed when they really didn't have to (as pointed out with the example of Amazon).
> Linux happened without single corporation controlling it.
A consortium of corporations, sure: linaro.org
They’re a lot like a revolutionary government that gradually becomes corrupt and as bad as the regime they overthrew.
Complex browser-based alternative to TCP? Standardized alternative to Socket.io? I can't say its not useful but webrtc is hardly the most important thing...
I'm not as positive about Google today as I used to be in the past, but I don't feel it's fair to pretend that they didn't help us take giant steps forward.
One consequence was the preceding generation of search engines being harder to drive for everyday folks, and a relevance approximation thereby more immediately accessible on the consumer scale, but let's face that the algorithmic approach also spawned a whole bottom-feeding industry of SEO snake oil vendors and their merry-go-round of clickbait, malware, and global-scale consumer surveillance. The incentive to hang yourself from a single keyword means that Google became the foster parent of AOL's Eternal September.
My personal feeling on the matter of Gmail and Google Maps is that they are best attributed to their personal creators (Paul Buchheit, and the Rasmussens, respectively), not the corporation. The seed of Google Maps was an acquisition, after all, and many other technologies I've seen offered up in neighbouring threads as proof of Google's benevolence were either acquisitions, or ones where substantial parts of any credit must be shared (webrtc has been mentioned; it is both).
Javascript in the browser still sucks mightily, and although it's not an argument I particularly wish to stir up there's plenty to say in support of that perspective. What's more, many of the best solutions are the product of independent/small/OSS groups, although I will confess a soft spot for TypeScript. Consequently, and especially w.r.t Gmail, Youtube, Maps, and <whatever Google Apps is called this year>, Chrome starts to look like the Lotus Notes of today: a thick client, developed by a large firm, in support of its specific service & platform offerings.
That’s the reason why Google, a very small newcomer, crashed the entire search engine market.
The world would be a better place if google search had been made a not-for-profit (maybe like wikipedia?)
By this point I would (maybe) pay a monthly subscription for a really good websearch like google circa 2005-2010
UI changes and new features aside, the web is just so much more adversarial nowadays. It's no wonder so much rubbish floats to the top of Google because the reality it's drowning out all the other content.
If you had the source code for 2005 Google it would be objectively worse today than it was then.
I'm trying to think of any changes to Wikipedia that happened after it launched and can't think of any. It surely does its job, but it doesn't change and there is no drive. Wiki concept was novel at the time, they did and continue to do an amazing job, but there's no evolution there. Or maybe I'm just a blind or unaware or biased - but, honestly, I tried to think of something and nothing came to mind.
Google constantly tries out some new things. They're really bad at maintaining them, they can't stop inventing chat services, they suck a lot and we could bash them endlessly, but let's credit what's due - they're always exploring some frontiers.
Just because cars still mostly have 4 wheels doesn't mean automotive engineers haven't been innovating the past 100 years.
Which among other things shows that patents are bad for innovation in new and quickly changing industry. Google came up with their algorithm and heavily patterned it. As an invention it was not ground-breaking, but it matched very well how web worked. This gave them essentially monopoly in search from which they massively profited. At least now those patents expire.
