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.
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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 😉
They absolutely would be bailed out. No question.
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 soonBuying the government (if doing so was even possible) means they need to furnish it’s debts.
Even if a company was willing to to undertake such a burden, nobody makes more money than the government, it just doesn’t have much reason to hold onto any of the cash it collects.
Besides, they can just print more.
Edit: that’s not to say it isn’t hilarious
Buying the government is so easy. You can get a politician in your pocket for a only few grand.
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.
