[jad]

How's that? To search the web, I'd go to DuckDuckGo or Bing or whatever. Other companies also provide web mail, maps, office document solutions, etc. Google's definitely better at those things, but using a worse version of those products would not cause the world to "screech to a halt."

Probably the most disruptive thing if Apple vanished would actually be every tech company suddenly needing to figure out how to use Windows or desktop Linux.

[JesseObrien]

As far as "screech to a halt." is concerned, it's maybe a little on the exaggerated side, but I'd believe it. I've worked for 5 different companies of varying sizes from 5 to 1000 employees. All of them have used Google Apps to run their business. Email, Calendars, Docs, Basically the Apps suite in it's entirety is the core of communicating and information storage.

There's arguments for backups, etc but in reality if the common business person working at these companies sits down and none of their Google products work, their day will halt.

[hammock]

Google Apps has 50 million users, iCloud has 125 million

Edit: to clarify, my source[1] said 5 million orgs with 50 million individual users. Not counting Gmail obviously

[1]http://blog.bettercloud.com/google-apps-stats/

[itcmcgrath]

Having worked on the Drive team, I can assure you Google Apps (which includes GMail, the Docs editors, and Drive) has much more than 50 million. A quick search on public figures for these services will give better numbers. Edit: Those are Apps for Work numbers, excluding consumers - obviously you can't compare just a subset with a total.

[toomuchtodo]

Why does Drive lack where Dropbox has succeeded (efficient, reliable syncing)? (Honest question, since you mentioned you're on the Drive team)

[saddestcatever]

In my opinion:

User Interface. Dropbox presented a beautifully clean metaphor for how your files get synced. It doesn't matter if you understand what "the cloud" is. My grandmother understands: "put things in folder, folder available elsewhere".

On the other hand we've got Google Drive. Is GMail using Google drive? Is Google Photos using Google Drive? Why don't folders other people have shared to me not appear in my folder? Why isn't 'Shared with Me' the same as "Mine". Is Google Drive the same thing as Google Docs?

Not to mention - Dropbox really pushed the "Desktop App", while Google Drive pushed the "Web First" approach. Add on referral bonuses, Dropbox had some good solid adoption - well, at least among free users.

I use both extensively - Dropbox Pro for everything personal, and Google Drive for everything at work, and I still get confused about the where I saved/shared files to in Google Drive.

[chipperyman573]

I used to have a ton of issues with reliable syncing but I haven't had any issues with it in the past year or so.

[btian]

@toomuchtodo

What do you mean?

Drive sync works fine like Dropbox, at least on Windows and Mac.

[magicalist]

> Google Apps has 50 million users, iCloud has 125 million

That source is pretty old and cites an even older source (it looks like it may be from Google I/O 2012). Searching for "Google Apps has 50 million users" actually gives articles from last year saying they have 50 million education users alone, so I'd say the number is a pretty extreme lowshot now.

But more importantly, why would you compare Google Apps and iCloud? The closer thing would be Android backup and iCloud, maybe?

[endtime]

How many of those people are iCloud users just because their iPhone's default settings sync their iMessages to it or whatever?

[rayiner]

For perspective, Microsoft Office has 500-750 million users.

[tempestn]

iCloud users are mostly individuals. Google Apps users are largely businesses with users of their own.

[sdrothrock]

We could probably think of alternatives for most of these things, but there are a lot of people who just use what came with their phone/browser.

Additionally, think of all of the Google-backed services out there provided by other companies. How many companies use gmail heavily that would lose all kinds of records?

Normal people would lose their e-mail too, and businessmen would lose a lot of their calendars. The actual solution doesn't matter as much as the data already invested in Google's solutions that would be lost if Google just vanished.

[latj]

The world wouldnt screech to a halt though. We're talking about what would happen if Google disappeared and its not a hypothetical situation. It happened in China for a five year period starting in 2010. People who used Google services were very upset. Replacements sprung up and quickly improved. They never caught up to Google but they were good enough, along with propaganda and the threat of prison, to keep people from making more of a commotion.

The biggest loss to humanity (in my opinion) would be all the translation data they hold privately. But Google really just people and money. If Google the entity disappeared tomorrow all those people who still know how to do the work will just start working on it elsewhere and catch up quickly.

[sdrothrock]

> We're talking about what would happen if Google disappeared and its not a hypothetical situation. It happened in China for a five year period starting in 2010.

My bad. I was thinking about what would happen if Google disappeared as in, one day their servers and services just aren't available for whatever reason, rather than a staged transition/fade out.

[smileysteve]

Critically

20 years ago, nobody could have pictured living without AOL, they had search, the directory, email, Aim - and connectivity.

15 years ago, few people could have seen a world without Yahoo.

3 months ago Dorsey said Twitter is an essential part of the internet.

[tedmiston]

And Google Takeout continues to ensure that won't happen.

[Thirdegree]

Only for people that proactively use it. Speaking of which, I should probably backup again.

[funkyy]

None search engine comes close to Google atm. Also Google marketing and SEO employs a much, much bigger number of people than people working as a freelancers related directly to Apple I assume. (not employees, the freelancers and companies that use the Google/Apple as platform to run their businesses)

[toxican]

I love the idea of DuckDuckGo, and I used them for a year or so before I realized every other search resulted in frustration and me appending a !ge to it. So yes, there are alternatives, but I don't find them to be nearly as good.

[pavanky]

Every tech company is a bit of a stretch. Get out of california more.

[ant6n]

I once went to China, without Google. My online life screeched to a halt.

On the other hand, there were a few Chinese people there, and most of them seemed to have a non-halted life.

[jhuckestein]

DuckDuckGo uses Google search results

[jacquesm]

Please don't spread information that is factually incorrect, especially not if it concerns a small company trying to compete with a much larger one.

"In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we primarily source from Yahoo!, and in some regions and scenarios, Yandex and Bing.

From: https://duck.co/help/results/sources

[firloop]

I thought DDG used Yandex for search?