[edanm]

> Serious question: what king did Google kill? They really didn't take down a big player in an existing industry, they started by being very good at search and displaced other search companies at a time when internet search wasn't a big business.

The answer is easy - Microsoft. They didn't directly take on MS's business, but in the general understanding of what was the big tech company, the one that gobbled up the best engineers, the one that startups were afraid would decide to compete with them - that was Microsoft in the late 1980s and 1990s, and it started shifting to Google.

And even though they didn't directly compete with them on being everyone's OS, they indirectly competed with them by turning the browser itself into, effectively, the OS everyone uses. They killed IE with Chrome, they made which OS you use far less relevant, they took over Mobile OS (shared with Apple, of course), and they are now competing on Cloud.

There is no question that what Google was from 2005ish to 2020ish, Microsoft was before that. You can even read pg articles about this exact thing.