Is something happening to Google's dominance?

For two decades, it enjoyed one of the best business models in history, search.

It combined wildly successful acquisitions of YouTube, AdSense, and Double Click,

with billion user franchises like Gmail and Google Maps. The stock nearly tripled from

2020 to 2021. It was a Wall Street darling and yet today Google may be finding the

previously rock solid ground shifting. Chat gee B. T and the pace of new AI-driven

products from Microsoft seem to come out of nowhere putting

alphabet on the backfoot.

The company that's been talking about AI for years all of a sudden looks defensive.

Pair that with the mood of cost cutting and profitability per employee focus in Silicon

Valley and you got to wonder are there serious problems brewing for our center perichai and the Google franchise.

That is the subject of this week's Tech Check Weekly is Google's dominance cracking.

This week started with a blockbuster New York Times article that Samsung had considered ditching Google for

big just considered it. I'm sure there's you know lots of folks you know talking

about about this you know I think obviously the Android ecosystem is very important for the company as well as

the search.

And that was enough to knock alphabet's share price down by nearly 4%.

Why?

Google pays billions of dollars to companies like Samsung and Apple to make

Google the default search engine on those devices but it's also the default for

reason. Google emerged from the search engine wars of the 90s to become synonymous with search.

Remember Ask Jeeves and Alta Vista, it's okay if you don't because Google relegated them to mere Wikipedia entries.

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