> Google added flights, but Booking Holdings (aka Priceline) continued to grow each year to 15B in revenue for 2019. (Huge drop for 2020 obviously.)

But did advertising on Google become more expensive for competitors once Google entered the market (e.g. did Google Flights also bid on Google Ads) and were those additional costs passed along to customers?

So while your example shows a competitor survived, it over looks the many start ups that did not, it overlooks the increased advertising costs, it over looks the increased cost to consumers and the chilling effect on potential new startups that might have been able to enter the market.

We do not even need to question any of this because before Google acquired the startup which became Google Flights the acquisition was reviewed and only approved under very strict Chinese firewalls between Google flights and Google search…but those restrictions only sought to restrict Google flight’s complete takeover of the market and ignored how it is being used to increase ad costs to the remaining market competitors.

The same has been seen with Google shopping, where Google essentially acquired a startup, it flopped, then Google positioned itself ahead of organic results and began systematically burying competition in the Google results. The fact you can’t name any of the travel or shopping startups that had thriving businesses that fell once Google entered the market is more telling of how Google has dominated the market rather than evidence Google hasn’t actually put anyone out of business.

> over looks the increased costs to consumers

Google flights takes you straight to the airlines websites. No intermediaries. How's that increasing costs to consumers?

Do third party booking sites usually offer lower prices than the airlines themselves? I've seen it happen but very rarely.

Though to correct myself I just used Google Flights for the first time in over a year and they do in fact list intermediaries in a price comparison list.

For the specific flight I searched for, the 3rd parties were listed as having cheaper prices than the airline itself, but upon visiting the sites and going through the optionals etc those prices turned out to be misleading, and eventually it was cheaper to book directly through the airline.

I think the whole argument is setting up the presupposition that Google kills non competitive businesses, and that's not what antitrust law is about. It's about protecting consumers, not competitors.

Take Android for example. Did Google kill Blackberry with Android? Or was it other factors like the Blackberry CEO cannibalizing their R&D budget, and stubbornly refusing to give consumers what they wanted?

Research in Motion thought the Blackberry keyboard was their killer feature for business professionals. They were wrong. The iPhone killed Blackberry, not Android.

The 3rd hand story I heard ~2011 from a former RIM executive who was there at the time of Steve Job's demo of the iPhone was that Mike Lazaridis' (co-founder of RIM) reaction to seeing the demo: "It's impossible! The whole thing would have to be a battery!"

He's right, it is impossible for the iPhone and clones to match the blackberry's batter life. It turns out any (certainly not all but few enough to keep blackberry in the market) prefer 60FPS scrolling to having the battery last a week.

In terms of marketshare, Blackberry's began to decline in late 2010, during the meteoric rise of Android. For context, Android eclipsed iOS just 6 months later.

But that's also my point - Blackberry killed Blackberry, not iOS or Android. Should Blackberry have been protected from it's competition?

I tend to think it was Blackberry killed Blackberry, not Android or iPhone. Not willing to change and adapt is the recipe for disaster in tech industry. I am not aware of any other industry that moves as fast and at such scale where the whole industry shift.

RIM definitely killed RIM. The sad result of decades of computer/phone market reports using "market share" leads to people misunderstanding "installed base". As the iPhone and Android took off BlackBerry's market share dropped. As in their share of the total smartphone market sales per quarter dropped. Their unit sales (at first) didn't drop much. The installed base of Blackberries also didn't drop (at first).

Android and iPhone initially ate into the unit sales of feature phones. RIM had pathetic consumer offerings. I replaced a Pearl (8100) with the first iPhone with iOS 1.0. For all the issues that combination had it was a far far better phone than my BlackBerry.

RIM didn't understand the consumer phone market at all, and frankly neither did other smartphone vendors outside Apple and Google. RIM assumed their Enterprise moat (Exchange integration, BES, etc) and a fucking hardware keyboard was enough to halt R&D and just sit on their hands. Meanwhile Apple and Google added Exchange support to their existing (ok but not great) POP/IMAP/CalDAV/CardDAV support, good app stores for third party software, and maintained their vastly superior web browsing capabilities. Their software keyboards also improved significantly with just better keypress accuracy and better predictive type.

So Apple and Google killed feature phones and then got the features people wanted/needed for Enterprise sales. They were already good enough for a majority of "business" uses since a lot of SMB users of Palms, WinMo, and BlackBerries used zero "Enterprise" features. They needed e-mail and SMS which feature phones didn't support and iPhone and Android had from the outset.

So Apple and Google crossed RIM's moat and RIM had nothing to offer as competition. Everything about BlackBerries was firmly fixed in 2005. This was 2010/11 and iPhones and Androids were the state of the art. Instead of trying to meaningfully compete RIM doubled down on the 2005 phones.

No one should feel any pity for them. Their management seemed trapped in some sort of "we'll just MBA our way out of this" fantasy land.

I remember back in the day, I saw what android was about to do to the market, the writing was on the wall for palm and blackberry. My only thought was that it would be nice if blackberry rebased itself as a business+security focused flavor of Android devices. Sad to say, I've almost never seen a blackberry since.

> It's about protecting consumers, not competitors.

That's true in the US, but not in the EU. And not operating in the EU is not really an option for any of the FAANG.

Some within the industry have been making noise that Google is quietly and slowly taking control of the whole trip funnel. Interesting read:

https://www.cartrawler.com/ct/digital-disruption/googles-ste...

I'd agree that providers are ceding too much control to Google for short-term wins, maybe without even realising the power they're handing over to Google.

Google is quietly inserting themselves between the customer and the business in all sorts of industries. They're not fully utilising that power which only makes them a benevolent (for now) dictator.

Interesting that no one mentions that Google also runs the backend flight/hotel search used by most trip planning sites. They bought it (ITA) over a decade ago.

So all these providers already lost this power years ago and are just providing a fancy UX over Google's backend travel search service. Now Google is merging the two search engines and cutting out the middleman.

The hotel /travel industry is probably the worst complainant as those industry's do a lot of sketchy stuff.

As does the insurance industry ever wonder why the UK insurance industry went all in on cuddly mascots - one factor was googles clamp down on black hat techniques simples

> If I type "<city> weather" google will show me the weather, but which weather company has shutdown because of that?

I don't know the answer to your (rethorical?) question but what I know is that weather sites and apps were once nice and useful and now are basically a placeholder for advertisement, sometimes even scammy one.

If you’re in the market for a replacement, I like yr.no. It’s a little more graphically polished than weather.gov, but no ads.

Although it is a joint project between the Norwegian Meteorological Institute and Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, it has forecasts available for the whole world in English, Norwegian, and Danish.

This. Google doesn’t have to knock them out of business entirely to ruin them.

Bringing bookings in to google maps has been a huge challenge for hospitality. This is flowing through to search as well. I recall someone from the industry doing a great breakdown of changes to the maps UI over time, and tying it to bookings & ad revenue, but can't find it offhand. This article can probably get you started https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2019/06/30...

> If I type "<city> weather" google will show me the weather, but which weather company has shutdown because of that?

I have noticed recently that the Weather.com app has added huge advertisements at the top and has roughly doubled the number of ads within the page. It honestly feels like desperation to me and I’ve been wondering if something bad is happening to the company.

It has no reason to exist in the first place. All the data for weather comes from government agencies anyway, and weather.gov does the same job. They’re a relic from when we did not have internet and there might have been some utility in a middleman producing a TV channel to get people that information.

To be fair, NWS does a poor job at presenting their own data. Some services do add their own models to NWS but the vast majority just re-wrap NWS forecasts. NWS data visualizations and the websites aren't the snazziest things but they do work.

I guess I'm weird but I prefer the NWS.

Me too, it’s so nice and simple.

While weather.gov does serve that purpose, someone else could provide a much better UI -- sort of like what Simple did with banking (I know they shutdown...haha, but they did create a better experience over traditional banking). Why give one website a monopoly?

I am not saying they should be restricted from existing, but I do not see a business case for it, at least certainly not as big of a company as it used to be.

IBM bought them a few years ago.

I switched to almost only using Google Flights. I try to use Skyscanner because I want to support the underdog, but Google Flights gives me better, and more results.

For hotels, Google started displaying results from other search engines like Agoda, so I just use Google for that too and clickthrough to whatever is the cheapest. They could also just stop displaying agoda from one day to the next.

At least in Europe, Skyscanner has more airlines than Google Flights, which makes the latter kinda useless if it misses the cheapest/shortest flight. That said, at least GF lists Rynanair & Wizzair now, but through Kiwi.com OTA which I'd rather avoid (direct is cheaper and less issues with changes).

The killer feature for me is : i can see in a calendar what the flight would cost at Google. Every other platform only shows exact date..

Skyscanner has this too. Click on the depart or return date and then select 'whole month'.

Google travel search features have a big impact on travel search sites such as expedia and tripadvisor.

https://skift.com/2019/11/07/googles-travel-gains-levy-pain-...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stephenmcbride1/2019/12/06/how-...

I remember reading a comparison on how the hotel search features impacted others vs booking.com and the conclusion was that booking.com has alright because it's more of a destination of its' own rather than driven by search traffic.

> Google added flights, but Booking Holdings (aka Priceline) continued to grow each year

OTAs keep growing, because travel in general keeps growing. But Google takes more and more space there. Right now the "book now" button on Google hotel page takes you to selection of OTAs. But one day it can take you to Google's room selection page and eventually to Google's checkout page - the actual booking can still be done with some external party and they'll handle the customer service etc., but your money will go to Google first.