For example Amazon Kindle was not the first eReader. But its platform-ecosystem was years sooner than Barnes & Nobles Nook and Kindle won out.
Amazon itself is technically a "second mover" because there was an obscure online book shop before, but no one else from the established sales companies or Walmart could compete with them.
Tesla was not the first electric car. But it is arguably the first reaching a production of a million, so it is the first e-car from a "main" manufacturer?
Incumbent companies have huge advantages, and it takes a lot to dislodge them even with new technology (as in your Amazon example.) Basically they have to be unwilling to match competitors' tech over a long period of time.
In my life I've seen that happen a handful of times. When it does, it's usually due to (1) tragic management ineptitude over an extended period of time, or (2) fear of cannibalizing an existing profitable business (e.g.,: Kodak refusing to move from film to digital cameras, or the car industry being slow to re-invest away from ICE production.) I see no evidence (yet) that AI-enhanced search is going to threaten Google's core business of "displaying ads on relevant search results", so the main risk here is long-term management failure. Right now Google's management is doing everything it can to signal (to shareholders and partners) that they're going to throw every resource they have at the problem.
Kodak actually had one of the first digital cameras, and the company still exists. And automotive OEMs are investing heavily into EVs, and they do this comparatively fast for companies of the size we are talking about.
First movers are the first to hit the innovater’s dilemma.
They are trapped by the decisions they made as first movers, while later incumbents have freedom to create improvements without worry about the installed base.
Apple is one company that never seemed to fall into that trap. They just tell the installed base “fuck you, buy the new thing” and somehow get away with it.
Apple comes in and innovates against something that existed but was user hostile.
It actually did happen to Apple over a long enough horizon, they cornered the paid digital music market by perfecting it, and upended it, and didn't innovate/upend again, and along came Spotify to upend it for them.
In the short term Google has an utterly dominant position in Search, and Bing AI is basically irrelevant to this. What people are worried about are the implications for the long term.
I have switched to Bing and Edge, then wrote a script to rack up points in hopes that I get moved up for the new BingGPT. Google search results have been trending toward crap for a while from my POV. 'Google it' is sticky, but I absolutely have not missed a beat with Edge and Bing. In fact, Edge has been a really pleasant surprise with features Chrome doesn't have. A calculator in the side bar is fracking awesome!
>> A calculator in the side bar is fracking awesome!
Another case of the browser doing what the OS and Desktop environment should be doing. I like to point at tabs - DEs and GUI toolkits never really came up with a good way to handle multiple documents well.
I think every major OS ships with some sort of calculator. The problem is discoverability. If you're in the middle of browsing, it's quite a bit of effort to say "oh that's right I have a calculator on here let me just find it in the start menu/Applications folder" as opposed to it just being there in the same app you're already using.
Widgets would be a potential solution but they keep being tried and abandoned soon after in desktop OSes.
On my mac I just use the built in calculator in spotlight. So cmd+space opens the spotlight search widget and then I can just type in whatever I need calculated. Not sure if something like this is built into Windows? More often than not I use Google as my calculator when on Windows.
I use Raycast for the same, but does that do multiple calculations? Ie. 184 + 64 then multiplied by 4, etc.
You can do it all as one big expression with parentheses and such but if you're doing a bunch of calculations on the go that could get repetitive, and one wrong Esc and your calculation goes away.
> Widgets would be a potential solution but they keep being tried and abandoned soon after in desktop OSes.
There's still a calculator widget for the MacOS notification center. It's accessed in any app through a trackpad gesture or by clicking on the date/time in the menu bar.
For now. This is what, the third iteration of widgets on Mac?
The fact that it seems to be similar enough to the iOS implementation of them gives me hope, but only barely.
You also need to know the feature exists (they had notifications before widgets, people might not know it was updated to support them), that there exists a calculator widget, and to add it before you need to use it. That's the same discoverabiloty problem, with the added wrinkle that functionality changed in Monterey.
I don't give a fuck about Bing, frankly, but ChatGPT (the actual first mover here) has already replaced a lot of what I used Google for during a work day.
I'll be their paying customer soon. It would be great if that meant I had privacy as well, but I kinda bleakly realize that that might be a bit of a pipe dream.
The big improvement in the chatgpt integrated by bing is that it can take today's search results into the chat to analyze seamlessly (after all, Bing already has all the search results cached internally). ChatGPT as it stands has old knowledge only unless you paste in the results you want to analyze.
The comment you replied to makes no mentions of timelines, and everything they said applies up to the point the first mover falls, which is clearly not the long term per your own argument.
The goal posts also aren't "search" they're "AI enhanced search", let's not muddy the waters by moving them. Google may certainly be dominating in search, but they are clearly trying to sprint from miles behind in the latter.
If I were the EU, I would perhaps consider slapping restrictions on Google's Chat AI (say, Bard) as being a separate field (AI-Assisted Search) being propped up by a monopoly in Standard Search. That would hurt Google's dominance quicker than any other action. Same for the DOJ.
Remember how much trouble Microsoft got into for having a basic monopoly on desktops with Windows, and trying to bundle Internet Explorer? Replace Windows with Standard Google, and Internet Explorer with AI-based Google Search. You'll cut Google off at the knees with that move. And even if they survive the ~4-5 years litigation, they'll be severely hampered, kind of like how Microsoft was with the mobile phone market.
Google isn't going to suffer severe business consequences for (temporarily) losing dominance in the "AI integrated search" field, because the revenue from that field is effectively NaN compared to Google's current revenue. They might hypothetically suffer if AI integrated search grows to become a major fraction of the existing Search revenue and Google fails to deploy their massive existing ML/AI resources to match Bing/OpenAI's unpatented, non-secret and easily-replicated techniques. And big firms have made such strategic errors in the past! But none of that is going to happen in the short term.
Read the comment thread you just replied to and tell me how any of what you just said is relevant to me correcting the sentence "Bing isn't dominating anything haha."
You said they are dominating "AI search" but that's wrong in many ways:
- Google's entire search engine has had many layers of "AI" powering it for years.
- Bing hasn't even released this supposed AI search engine to the public.
Your other example was Tesla and the two examples couldn't be more different. Your statement would be like someone saying Tesla was "dominating" electric cars before they ever even sold a single Roadster and had just posted a demo video. It's just wrong. I can be first to market with a banana that glows in the dark, am I in the club now too?
They may dominate if this exact form of conversational answers proves popular and if launched more than a hacked together demo and only then is some strong claim they are doing anything interesting could be worthwhile.
Until then they are kind-of first-but-actually-not-really in a kind-of-theoretical-market, and not dominating it all or reaping any first-mover advantage given their opponents are ready to follow on immediately.
Just because Google uses AI for things like ranking does not put them in the same category as a search engine with AI integrated. I hope you realize that. There's a clear differentiator at play with Bard and New Bing, and that's the space people are talking about.
The market exists. Products have been announced. Some are clearly more popular than others. I don't know why you care so much that Google beats Bing, but it's plainly obvious both from people's and Google's own reactions that Bing is currently considered the winner in the space.
Will it last? Maybe. Maybe not. The very thread you are replying to is that first movers ultimately fail. But it's plainly clear Bing has captured the first mover advantage in the space, whether you like it or not.
No one hates Google more than me trust, check the comment history. Meanwhile you're stanning for something that has 0% market penetration that is essentially massively PR'ed product announcement with no market fit (not even released), and that already has competitors following easily within months (that are likely better) is some sort of first-mover advantage even comparable to what Tesla had.
On the topic of big companies making strategic errors, it's not entirely unthinkable that if AI generates a lot of hype, Google would throw away its market-dominating search engine and replace it with some AI chatbot-thing without market dominance.
It could very well be that even a small chance of this happening can cause Microsoft to go all in on making Bing more AI. Being very expensive is the point.
Bing's image search is better than google's. Hands down. While this has been popularized for ...ehem...nsfw reasons, it's also very useful to find charts and visualizations related to a particular topic. As an example, I was searching for charts that showed laptop vs desktop market share, and bam! There's the latest projections.
Tangent: I wonder if Bing has an advantage in that most people perform SEO for Google; so long as Bing has different algos it may be “immune” to Google-focused seo?
It will be interesting to see how the next few years play out in the EV space. Tesla suddenly has actual competition that is very good. Arguably better, aside from that nagging little detail -- the charger network. Tesla needs to keep throwing money at the Supercharger network and do whatever they can to keep it exclusive. Anything that puts the competition on an equal playing field for fast charging would be devastating to Tesla's market share.
Yes, I'm quite excited to see the new EVs coming out in the next few years. Still like my Tesla but the list of grievances grows over time.
I think they'll ultimately have to open up the charging to get federal funding, but it'll be interesting to see what happens when they do. It's definitely a massive advantage right now.
I think the charging network is going to prove to be the iMessage of Tesla. By keeping it closed, they will be selling many more cars. In Europe where they had to use the standard port and open the network, there will be much stiffer competition.
That happened 4 years ago, and Tesla has done nothing but increase sales in Europe since then. I'm sure this will change as traditional car manufacturers improve their EV lineups. Europe in general also has a lot more options for the EV charging market so I don't think the SuC network is as pronounced there.
It will probably make a bigger impact in the US. And the switch to a standard interface is holding up billions in federal funding so Tesla will probably eventually take the hit.
It's unlikely Tesla's market share of the total car market is going to go down no matter how well other companies do. What we're seeing is a general shift towards electric cars, which is only a good thing for Tesla.
