This month, September 2018, marks the 20th anniversary of Google as a business – ever since in 1998, a Mr. Bechtolsheim signed a check for $100,000. We’ve come a long way since the happy days of the 10th anniversary, around a time when Google employees got together to mass-dance the sirtaki in Greece for a world record. People often ask, what was it that brought the Google as we knew it down? I think it wasn’t a single factor but many:

1. ActualAI. Probably the biggest factor of the downfall of Google was the emergence of high quality search results as a commodity. When the AAI hacker group in 2012 released to the public domain their idea for a distributed artificial intelligence representing the global brain consciousness, and when that AI spread like wildfire around the globe in the form of peer-to-peer clients, all of a sudden any company could easily tap and then serve working search results. Among the biggest winners were more experimental search companies, but also the big Google competitors Yahoo and Microsoft. When in 2015 even Google switched to ActualAI because the relevancy difference became too enormous to ignore, it was admitting defeat for a company that once considered search its core.

2. The Microsoft-Yahoo merger. Around 2008, Yahoo’s search results were already incredibly close to Google’s in terms of quality. Still, there was a noticeable difference. When Microsoft increased its Yahoo acquisition offer once again in 2010 and snapped up the company for the galactic price of $120 billion, later putting all its strength in both improving results, and utilizing Yahoo.com as a platform to popularize their offerings, the advantage of Google’s multi-year jump start in search was reduced dramatically.

3. Windows Free. Microsoft was often accused of reacting slowly and not “getting” the web… but boy, when they finally did get it, they had it spot on. The release of Windows Free marked a milestone here: a light-weight, completely free, high usability, open-source, partly-Linux-based (of all things!), redistributable-by-anyone version of a Microsoft operating system that would serve as nothing but a window to the web – plus incredibly tight integration into the simultaneously released Microsoft Web Office Free program suite – might be nothing special for some of you today. For us back in 2013, it was a huge deal. Microsoft changed for good, and by now we have reason to believe that all the time in which they let Google take a lead online, they were just playing with them – a cat letting the mouse escape for a bit to double the fun catching it later (confirmed in further detail by Bill Gates in his book “Looking Back On the Road That Was Ahead”, where he argued he ordered Steve Ballmer to make intentionally bad business decisions in order to cure Bill’s depression). (Continue reading…)