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.
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 😉
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 soon
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.
When 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.
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.
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)
At 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).
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.
