[faut_reflechir]

Initially voted Google based on a hunch: Google Search is the most likely flagship product of a FAANG to get displaced by a competitor. Unlike, say, Amazon as a hub for products or Facebook as a social network, Google Search is not a natural monopoly -- there's no inherent reason a search engine should maintain dominance if it loses its competitive advantage. The complaints from tech friends ("you can't find anything anymore") that I've heard for years now are starting to come from tech-agnostic family instead. Alternatives are still worse, but it's easy to imagine a breakthrough.

However, this doesn't mean Google/Alphabet itself, with its diverse product suite and huge amount of advertising data, will decline in any meaningful sense; that will happen on a much slower scale.

[scrollaway]

Google is the dominant search engine essentially everywhere except for China and Russia.

Amazon's marketplace dominance is pretty US/UK specific, and even there, there are plenty of alternatives. Amazon marketplace is actually only available natively in a small handful of countries.

I feel like most people in this thread are grossly overevaluating Amazon's ability to stay relevant. If a competitor pops up with consistently better prices/better products/better marketing then they'll steal users from Amazon and over time dominance is lost.

What exactly does Amazon have that prevents me from stopping the use of it?

Google has excellent quality search results and a ton of products with a huge lock-in to their account ecosystem. Apple has fantastic product quality. Meta has a ridiculous network effect in three of the four products I use it for -- I can't even leave two of them (Whatsapp and FB) despite not even liking them! And Netflix consistently produces and publishes some of my favourite shows.

Amazon has nothing I can't get elsewhere, it's just a bit more consolidated. With the exception of AWS, and as I said upthread, who knows if that will remain the same company.

[jandrewrogers]

What is invisible to most consumers about Amazon is that they have a massive footprint across the entire supply chain for a wide and growing range of consumer good categories. Brands have been slowly outsourcing various parts of their production processes to Amazon. Amazon manages these parts of the business much more efficiently, and in a more integrated way, than what brands were doing before so it is both attractive and sticky. Many new brands are purely virtual organizations with almost everything built on top of Amazon's ecosystem -- virtual brands were always a thing, but Amazon has made it nearly frictionless.

Because of this, I expect them to make a ton of money off consumer retail even if their marketplace fades into the background. The brand management business on Amazon has been growing like crazy too, which pretty much assures Amazon will always be taking their dollar.

[klabb3]

Another thing is that searching the web is steadily becoming displaced by more structured and localized forms of search, such as videos, nearby restaurants, products, used goods and so on. In some cases keyword search is replaced entirely - by recommendations & personalized simple buttons (gas stations on the way to my destination, the latest episodes of my favorite podcasts, etc etc).

From an ad-pipeline perspective, Google isn't entirely left behind in this new world, they still have YouTube, Google maps, Gmail, etc. However, they missed most of social and e-commerce, which feels irrecoverable at this point.