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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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Google Maps -- outside of the U.S., restaurant reviews (which derive from that) surpass Yelp.

Google Drive -- at our company of about 100 people we no longer routinely use Microsoft Word, Excel, etc. (granted, most of the executives and salespeople still have Microsoft licenses as they may need to send a Word or Excel document).

Android

Chrome

I don't know if that any of the above are "super successful" relative to Search, but then very few things are. But that's the core of their complacency -- anything they build gets compared to a trillion dollar, 90% margin business. For example GCP is a clear miss on a relative scale (relative to AWS and Azure) but still would be a multi-billion dollar company in its own right.

Granted, there are a lot of total whiffs too.

I felt that was true pre-pandemic (and I used it, and wrote reviews), but Trip Advisor's coverage seems crap now, and it's scores not really to be trusted.

That hasn't been my experience.

Just now I randomly picked a restaurant in Rome and it has 1300 reviews on Google maps and 800 on trip advisor.

I’m not talking about useful; I’m talking about profitable. Android I’ll concede.

I’m in a very large professional service firm and we exclusively use office products along with everyone I know. I think it’s quite rare to use Google Drive.