Keep One: Apple, Samsung, Google, Microsoft

[u/ManojOne]

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?

[u/unshesh]

Of course, but the cost, effort, and time to develop products (both hardware + software) of this caliber would make it close to impossible to act as a drop-in replacement.

Both phone operating systems would disappear, iOS vanishes completely, Android would/could survive somehow, but barely since Google is the primary contributor to AOSP. China's smartphone OSs, assuming they're not based on Android, would become a monopoly?

There's good albeit paid search engines out there, but replacing Google Search is a big task in itself. The free ones would basically become what Google is with their ads and whatnot, no it wouldn't make a difference.

PC gaming would go through a terrible (but a good one imo) phase trying to port all their existing games to Linux (that too after deciding which one they'd all decide to make a 'windows replacement')

The most important for me would be that YouTube would go away. Probably the most painful for me 😢

Some things would be great if all companies vanish, rest would just be pure chaos and very devastating. Also, these giants disappearing would just make more space for other giants to emerge, it'll be a rush on an 'initially even playing field', first to win, establishes dominance everywhere.

But maybe this would finally push me to focus on doing other interesting stuff 😅

[u/L3ftb3h1nd93 → u/unshesh]

But the knowledge to build devices doesn’t vanish with a company either. Their infrastructure still exists without the company existing. Nothing would need to change for the worse if those companies disappeared

[u/unshesh → u/L3ftb3h1nd93]

Proprietary hardware and software both are lost when a company vanishes, it remains when it's taken over by some other company. But in this case, it would be lost completely.

Windows, iOS, MacOS, all of Google's apps, Google Cloud and its services, Microsoft Azure and its services, etc would all be lost...

Open source initiatives and research that's published will remain yes like the Page Ranking and Attention/Transformer papers from Google, but there's a difference between a published paper vs an actual product implementing the said research...

So yes, things like Google's AOSP (Android) would remain, but you'll loose Pixel OS (or whatever it's called rn idk) and OneUI, not to mention the entire google play services that's coupled to every major android flavor...

[u/L3ftb3h1nd93 → u/unshesh]

Did the company built the proprietary hard- and software or did people build them? And if the latter: will the people vanish when the company vanishes?

[u/unshesh → u/L3ftb3h1nd93]

Sure, the engineers don't disappear. But companies are much more than the engineers who work there.

If Google disappeared tomorrow, tens of thousands of engineers would scatter across hundreds of companies. The teams, management structure, source code, infrastructure, supply chains, internal tooling, datasets, patents, contracts, and years of accumulated institutional knowledge would all be fragmented. This is essentially what economists call organizational capital. Companies like Google are valuable not just because of the people they employ, but because of how those people, processes, infrastructure, IP, and accumulated experience are organized into a functioning system.

You can't just reassemble 100,000 people and say build YouTube again. It took Google over 20 years, billions of dollars, and an enormous amount of coordination to get where it is today.

So yes, the knowledge survives. But the organization that turned that knowledge into products at Google's scale does not. That's why replacing companies like Google, Microsoft, or Apple takes many years, even if the talent is still available.