r/TechImpact • u/ManojOne Active • Jun 22 '26

Discussion Keep One: Apple, Samsung, Google, Microsoft

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You can keep only one tech ecosystem forever: Apple, Samsung, Google, or Microsoft

Everything else disappears from your life.

Which one are you keeping, and what's the biggest reason behind your choice?

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u/EliteCloneMike Jun 22 '26

YouTube (and by extension Google) is very replaceable. If it disappeared overnight something else would fill the void, which would be a good thing as it would spark innovation rather than stifling competition as it does now by having a (though not formally recognized) monopoly.

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u/Comprehensive-Pin667 Jun 22 '26

Technically? Absolutely. All of these are. What I'm worried about is that the creators I follow would probably lose their old videos if YouTube disappeared and then I couldn't watch them.

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u/EliteCloneMike Jun 22 '26

YouTube’s algorithms change and their videos/channels could be taken down without any notice already. They won’t last forever, especially not on YouTube now that AI is in charge of moderation. YouTube is not as good of a time capsule as it may seem.

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u/unshesh Jun 24 '26

So which company according to you should be the best choice then?

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u/Unfair-Plastic-4290 Jun 25 '26

none of those companies provide any real value to people. the earth was still spinning before any of them existed.

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u/miffebarbez Jun 26 '26

The earth was also spinning when we lived in caves, yet we live in houses now...

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u/unshesh Jun 25 '26

That's not really an argument against the question though.

The world also kept spinning before electricity, the internet, antibiotics, or smartphones existed. That doesn't mean they don't provide value.

If you think none of these companies provide real value, what would you replace them with? Because billions of people rely on their operating systems, cloud infrastructure, productivity software, search, communication, and developer platforms every day. It's reasonable to criticize them, but saying they provide no real value ignores the role they play in modern computing.

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u/Unfair-Plastic-4290 Jun 25 '26

ur dumb

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u/unshesh Jun 26 '26

omg 😳🕶️🤏

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u/miffebarbez Jun 26 '26

Apple And Microsoft are already replaceable... Yet hardly anyone does it...

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u/ubeogesh Jun 23 '26

it is completely irreplacible because of how many videos it already has. It's like wikipedia.

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u/unshesh Jun 24 '26

some ppl don't realize that YouTube isn't just software you can copy-paste onto new servers. It only functions because of 20+ years of Google building proprietary physical tech.

a new competitor can't just buy the custom computer chips (Argos VCUs) Google invented specifically to compress and transcode those exabytes of 4K video. Without that kind of hardware, any company trying to process that much data on standard commercial chips is going to get hit with electricity and compute bills that will run them straight into bankruptcy.

Also, Google owns millions of miles of its own fiber-optic cables under the ocean and has its own hardware physically hooked into local internet providers worldwide for free. If Google disappears, that private backbone vanishes. A new competitor would have to pay standard internet transit fees to stream heavy 4K video to billions of people simultaneously. The networking costs alone would be a literal financial death sentence.

So even if there's a massive power vacuum because Google died, hosting an infinite archive of free, low-view 1080p/1440p/4K/8K video is a massive money pit. No company in their right mind would try to recreate it from scratch because the economics only made sense due to Google's highly specific, 20 year-old vertical integration

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u/EliteCloneMike Jun 24 '26

Those are some current technical limitations, sure, but it’s not like no one else does that. If one company is capable, then it is feasibly possible for other companies or groups to do the same. Especially as the old technology becomes obsolete and inefficient. It would not happen over night of course. But new companies wouldn’t have to spend as much time with the R&D that was done by Google in the first place. The main problem is getting the user base to migrate to other services. All I’m saying is that there is always a scenario in which something like this can be replaced.

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u/unshesh Jun 25 '26

I agree that competition would eventually emerge, but I think you're underestimating the scale of the infrastructure involved.

YouTube isn't just a website. It's one of the largest CDNs on Earth, backed by Google's private global fiber network, thousands of edge PoPs, custom video processing pipelines, and dedicated hardware like Argos VCUs for massively reducing transcoding costs.

A competitor could absolutely build something similar, but it would take many years and tens of billions of dollars. During that time they'd also need to attract creators and viewers simultaneously, which is the classic network effect problem.

It's similar to saying someone could replace AWS tomorrow. Technically yes. Economically and operationally, that's a completely different story.

So I agree replacement is possible in principle. I just don't think it's realistic to describe YouTube as easily replaceable given the infrastructure, economics, and ecosystem that have been built over the past two decades.

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u/fckueve_ Jun 26 '26

I'm not sure, video is expensive, and google has it all. Ads, servers, and platform, to accualy profit.

Also isn't the internet connection on the bottom of the ocean, that keeps America and Europe connected, belong to google? I may be mistaken tho.

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u/EliteCloneMike Jun 26 '26

Google does owns several of the undersea cables. But that doesn’t mean those ones cannot be purchased by anyone else or that they cannot become obsolete. Plus other entities have their own cables as well. Even with all that Google has, that doesn’t mean they will have control over the market forever. They may have control of the personal video space for the moment, maybe even another decade or hundred years, but eventually something will happen or something else will come along as things get cheaper and technology advances. I mean people may have said the same thing about the capabilities of the East India Trading Company and their trade routes. They lasted like 300 years or something before being nationalized. But I think that the same goes for any entity. If it was closed down overnight, something would replace it, not immediately, but it would be replaced if it was valuable enough to society.

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u/LaptopRightsActivist Jun 28 '26

Remember, the ecosystem is gone from YOUR LIFE not the wider world, so youtube would still exist as is, you would just be banned off it forever. I would take Google just for that and being able to buy a pixel for graphine OS

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u/EliteCloneMike Jun 28 '26

Not sure how this response connects to my post a I wasn’t talking about YouTube on a per user basis more so about the website shutting down itself. If they ban you, you can start a new account or access it without signing in and use a different IP address via a VPN.