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The lawsuit announced against Google this morning misses the forest of problems created by their monopoly by focusing on a single tree—search.
Here are two personal examples of negative side-effects from their largesse to other industries.
The first example comes from the
Here are two personal examples of negative side-effects from their largesse to other industries.
The first example comes from the
world of photo editing tools. For over a decade a small company named NIK made an excellent set of Photoshop plugins for colorizing or B+W converting images with excellent film simulations and HDR image processing. These plugins cost around $200, not cheap, but very
worthwhile. There were competitors who weren’t as good, but they charged less. On the whole, a healthy market. Google decided they needed the programmers and technology from NIK for their android project so they bought the company. Shortly after their purchase, they decided
to generously give away the tools for free. Suddenly the best tools were available at no cost. Unsurprisingly, this was devastating to competitors and many exited the market. A couple of years later, Google decided it was too much work to maintain and completely dropped
support for new photoshop versions, and the market was left barren.
The second example comes from the world of software development tools. For years I had been a happy paying customer of tools from Instantations, makers of Window Builder Pro, CodePro AnalytiX, and many
The second example comes from the world of software development tools. For years I had been a happy paying customer of tools from Instantations, makers of Window Builder Pro, CodePro AnalytiX, and many
other fine tools to speed up software development. These tools were not cheap, but they were well worth the expense. Much like the previous story, shortly after purchase, Google started giving away licenses for free with the same consequence. After a few years of this,
Google simply gave all of the source code to the Eclipse Foundation for integration into their namesake IDE.
There are complicated issues here, tied in with the open source movement in general. Many great Apache projects have come out of companies that failed and gave away
There are complicated issues here, tied in with the open source movement in general. Many great Apache projects have come out of companies that failed and gave away
all of their code, or that simply gave away infrastructure code that to them didn’t risk giving away the secret sauce to their competition. It is unlikely that a suitable remedy will be provided by the judicial system. Rather, the legislature must carefully consider how to
partition the benefits of FOSS vs the market-destroying practices Google and other large companies unleash on markets they are uninterested in.
