The Google Layoffs And How Apple Could Get Into Search Engine Business

One of the most amazing things about technology is that over time, many things become easier. I saved 100% of the money for my first car (Honda Accord) during NYSC. Then, it was easy to make tons of money buying computer motherboards, hard disks, RAMs, etc and coupling them together for a huge margin. The company, Ultinet Systems, which I registered with within two days of arriving at Jos NYSC Camp found open doors in that city. 

In such, I won the federal contract to lay the structured office wiring of the NYSC secretariat. That was the first time the government paid me. Connecting cables and RJ11 and RJ15 was like a geek-level job. It was like that when I got to Lagos, fixing computers, helping buy devices. Then, they took us out of business: computers became so easy to “install” that geeks were not needed to assemble anything! Today, it is buy, connect and use, with minimal help from any techie.

Yes, the boot diskette is gone and anyone can set up a PC or laptop; they do not even include manuals these days.

That trajectory is also happening in how companies assemble teams and create products: “…Google has made a significant reorganization, including the layoff of at least 200 employees from its “Core” teams”. Simply, the elite teams in Google are now largely plug and play; guys from Mexico and India will do those jobs at fractions of what Google could have paid the American workers! When you add AI into the mix, everyone becomes ordinary. This is how it is going to be in the next few years.

Google needs all the money it can save. The news is that Google’s Alphabet paid Apple $20 billion in 2022  to be the default search engine in the Safari web browser. That is a lot of money just to have a special seat on devices. Google controls 80% of the U.S. search market. Apple generates about 20% of its profit from such payments from Google. If you look at it carefully, this is a circle: Google pays Apple, Google gets funds from advertisers, and sends some to Apple, provided Apple does not allow another company into the party. Apple is happy since it is guaranteed a solid inflow. Government thinks that is illegal. 

Now, with that Apple-Google arrangement on shaky grounds (there is a court case playing with the US government), Google should be worried because if the government breaks that party, Apple will go into the search engine business, and can make its version the default search engine on Apple devices.

One of the most amazing things about technology is that over time, many things become easier. Those days, it was easy to make tons of money buying computer motherboards, hard disks, RAMs, etc and coupling them together for a huge margin. But over time, computers became so easy to… pic.twitter.com/JDz5wwKMfa

— Ndubuisi Ekekwe (@ndekekwe) May 3, 2024

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