Wednesday, November 5, 2014

Is Google Today's Monopoly? Why Not?

What is Monopoly?

Monopoly is a business-model where there is only one provider of goods and services. They have ability to set the price (price-fixing) and rule the market.

Why Monopoly Is Bad?


There are reasons for us to tell monopoly is bad;

1) As I mentioned above, monopolies can set the any price which is suitable for them. Basically, they do not have to care about demand because consumer has no choice.

2) No-Consumer Power. Basically, when consumer doesn’t like the service or goods his or her purchased, they do not have any power to be against them. The Monopoly can not be threated by `Okey, now on, I will not use your products and I will shift to your rivals`. So whether they like or not, firm is happy.

3) Firm Fails – Market Fails. If somehow Firm fails, directly it will affect the market. For example; if you are living in a small city and you have just one TV Cable provider, if that firm fails, you can not watch Cable TV until the new firm enter the market.

4) Be Immortal. They can use the big advantages of being a monopoly and develop more and more and become immortal in the market. This is good for the firm but bad for the economy because new firms can never catch their speed.


Is G
oogle Monopoly?
Search-Engine-Market
Search Engine Market Share

Every day, we are using at least one Google product. Personally, 90% what I’m using included this site is provided by Google. So, if Google entered our life that much, does it make Google Monopoly?

Google started as search engine and now has 59% of Search Engine Market Shares. The closest competitor is Baidu with 29% yet Baidu is only popular in China. Therefore, we can’t say that Baidu is a global search engine. And if we sum Bing and Yahoo they have total market share just %12. So we can easily say that Google is the biggest search engine in the world.

Secondly, in Operating System Market Google and Apple has a competition but Google’s market share is bigger than Apple.  Despite the fact that, Google’s Mobile Phone Nexus has much little market share than Apple still Google’s Android has more market share than Apple’s IOS.  That is basically because a lot of mobile phone producers use Android Operating System such as Samsung, LG etc.
Mobile-Phone-Share
Mobile Phone/Tablet Operation System Market Share


Of course If we look at the Google Blogger, Google Translate, Google Docs, Youtube etc. We can find it out that in every Internet related business, Google has a share.

So, Why Google’s competitors has complains?

They complained about that `Google` as a bias search engine show Google products upper than the competitors. Today, I made a little experiment and write google `Mail` and `Map`. Let’s look at the results;

Yahoo indicated that `when you write to Google `Map` Yahoo is not showing in the first page.` Despite the fact that it shows in first page, it is in the bottom of the page. But when we write to Google `mail` it is showing Gmail as second and whereas Microsoft’s Live Mail is first and Yahoo is third. Even though, Yahoo has more monthly active users than Gmail, Google is showing Yahoo as a third. (This is not certain that who is second or third, because every statistics say almost different numbers.)

I mostly considered Google as monopoly in search engine market with enormous market cap.  And this monopolistic advantage makes them earn huge profits and lead Google to develop more and more and created today’s Google Octopus. It is true that Google is everywhere. Despite the fact that Google is American company. In Europe, Google has more monopolistic shares such as 80% as a search engine. This is very important subject in world economy and previously, French Economist Jean Tirole wrote about How to fight against monopolistic tech companies such as Apple and Google and this made him to win Nobel. In my point of view, Google is a monopoly in today’s business. Is google evil? I don’t think to say google is evil fair. (By the way, I want you to remember that Google’s motto is `Don’t be evil`) Company made wrongs, behaved like monopoly but trying to solve this situation. Naturally, when you grow that much it is impossible not to act like monopoly. 

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