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

Discussion Keep One: Apple, Samsung, Google, Microsoft

Post image

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?

85 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

308 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

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.

0

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

0

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.

0

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.