When Google started promoting Google Flights and Hotels over other sites, they did not offer close to the best information. In fact, as the article claims, they still don’t. Yet despite that competitors are losing traffic and going out of business (eg. Hipmunk).
It’s not hard to see where this leads over time. The competitors struggle to stay in business or even get the traffic needed to improve their products while Google gets to keep investing and iterating. Maybe in 5-10 years they’ll have a product better than the existing ones, but they’ll also have driven most competitors to obscurity.
For me, speed is one factor of product quality, but result integrity is the thing that I care the most about.
Yahoo was the search engine that crushed altavista, then ultimately bought babelfish and let it rot, all several years before google translate came out.
There certainly did used to be competition to Google Translate but Google crushed them by promoting their own services (which came later)[1].
I often see the argument made that these monopolies just happen to have the best software but often those arguments miss how those monopolies had already killed the competition and were now suffocating the market so new competition struggles to rise. This was a common tactic by Microsoft in the 90s too, so it's by no means unique to Google.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babel_Fish_(website)