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.
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.
even if a meteor hits and wipe out one side of Earth, google(or any big tech’s) data centers around the world would still be functional.
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.
They could switch to LibreOffice, OnlyOffice, or Collabora and there are plenty of other free e-mail providers.
It would take some time and effort to get everything switched over though.
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)
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.
As of today it wouldn’t be that hard, alternatives are available and some of them are as good but don’t have the same market share.
Right now? Bad. Other Big Tech would swoop in and tech their place and try and take their proprietary market share, but a lot of the open source work would be left to die on the vine, including Firefox. It would be a loss of paid talent in the FOSS world and a massive consolidation of big tech.
Online advertising would take a big hit, lots of small businesses would struggle until other advertising companies (Meta, Twitter, whatever, smaller website analytics products) take over and direct customers to them. Major international businesses would probably sit one out wait until the market has resettled itself (like we’re seeing with Twitter right now).
Lots of search engines would try to capture a piece of the pie.
Online advertising would take a big hit, lots of small businesses would struggle until other advertising companies (Meta, Twitter, whatever, smaller website analytics products) take over and direct customers to them. Major international businesses would probably sit one out wait until the market has resettled itself (like we’re seeing with Twitter right now).
Lots of search engines would try to capture a piece of the pie.
