Do not be evil
Today is quite a difficult, but obviously a significant day. Today, Yandex had to take a step that, as I always wanted to believe, would never have to be done.
We appealed to the regulator, FAS, to return equal relations in the market of mobile devices. Our appeal - the recognition of one unpleasant fact. You and I have all the chances to get into the world, where only one company will decide who will get the opportunity to bring services to people and what these people can use.
We always believed in the competition and the right to choose the user. So much so that even in our search results from the first days of Yandex’s existence, there are links to other popular search engines. To be honest, I was always sure that Google believes the same thing. What is the company of engineers producing cool products. Alas, it is now clear that in addition to the technical company, which once considered its slogan “Do not be evil”, now there is a completely different one - a company controlled by lawyers and businessmen.
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Android has long looked completely open. And it certainly does not look like the open competition policy of Google on this platform. For example, now we are faced with the fact that vendors, in order to sell phones with Yandex services in Russia, must abandon all Google services not only in Russia, but in all other countries. At the same time, the rules for receiving GMS and Google Play for each of them may change at any time.
In an open OS, we want the terms and licenses to be open and transparent to everyone.
Thanks to its brilliant programmers and excellent technology, Google has been able to conquer almost the whole world. However, there are still very few places where local services are more popular. Local players live alongside their users, and it seems that this helps them a lot to create products so that they remain stronger than global ones. It's easy for me to talk about Yandex, but let's take another example. Compare the completeness of the 2GIS directory for Russia and Google Maps or the number of active Russian users on VKontakte and Facebook. It is logical that the manufacturers of phones and tablets want their offspring to take into account the peculiarities of the market in which they will be sold. Explay, Prestigio and Fly, for example, wanted this, but at the end of last year, at the insistence of Google, they had to abandon the pre-installation of Yandex services. This happened when it came to the understanding that the devices of these manufacturers began to occupy a significant share in the Russian market of mobile devices.
I read a lot of comments on this story and, to my surprise, I found out that even intelligent adults do not always understand what the current situation threatens. In fact, now the owner of an “open operating system” makes vendors refuse to work with those who compete with Google in any markets. And I'm not even talking about how Yandex threatens it, but about the position in which it puts both developers and users.
Google bought Android almost ten years ago. During this time he has come a long way and not only technically. Around the middle of this path, an important trend emerged - Google began to saturate Android with its services and applications that simply had to be pre-installed on each device. This search, and maps, and geolocation tools. Just think: just three years ago, there were only nine such mandatory services. Now there are almost 20 of them . The fact that a technology company wants to create more good services may not be bad in itself. The problem is that its services are preinstalled on phones and tablets, largely due to the fact that the manufacturer cannot put anything else on them. Android is becoming increasingly surrounded by public and not-so-called agreements, more and more closed. All this is rapidly beginning to remind me of the story of Windows.
Let us return for a minute to 1999 and recall a completely similar situation. More than 95% of the personal computer market is running Windows, an integral part of which is Internet Explorer 5 (and a little later, and if you're lucky, 5.5 and 6). What do we know about this browser? That it was the worst browser in the history of the Internet. Technological shackles in which we were forced to impose nested tables. Even Microsoft employees admit that it was terrible. This will last another ten years - until 2009, when the European Union forced Microsoft to offer European users a choice of browsers when they first started. And Google, along with Opera and Mozilla, actively participated in the unfair competition proceedings against Microsoft.
You can ask - for what reason? After all, Microsoft created Windows. Why they could not pre-install their browser in the system? The fact is that many people did not understand that there are any alternatives. They bought the device and it already had a browser. Also today they buy an Android phone and use only what they already have. Many users are sure that the phone is sold ready to use and never look in Google Play to install other programs.
The results of the “European Commission against Microsoft” case gave a huge impetus to the development of new Internet technologies. In fact, today's success of Google Chrome is largely due to the very antitrust decision. Of course, WebKit, Blink and Chromium in general, all this code base are good technological products, but nobody knew about them, and therefore it was extremely difficult to develop them.
Look at the graphics . The share of Google Chrome has become more active since December 2009, when people in Europe were able to choose a browser. At the same time, Firefox and Opera’s shares crawled upwards . The competition has become real and, as always happens, made browsers get better and better. Won all of this. Browser developers were able to show their product to users. And they, in turn, were surprised to find that browsers have stepped far forward. Website developers began to live in the new web, with modern, convenient and, most importantly, developing standards. And even the victim Microsoft won - it allowed the company to focus and release a completely different IE. Try it, it is not so bad. The whole modern web application revolution began at the moment when the choice appeared.
What is happening now? In fact, if now you want to create applications that can be used by a large number of people, it should be available in the App Store and Google Play Market. And if Apple has a Buddhist device that is inseparable from software, then Android manufacturers are facing a choice - either Google Play and 20 pre-installed Google services, or alternative solutions and an alternative store, but for all regions without exception.
Now those who want to focus on creating search, maps or browsers, are forced to create their own alternative platforms. Approximately the same as a little more than 7 years ago, opponents of Opera, Mozilla and Google urged them to do their operating systems with their browsers and anything else. But even if someone now makes a new mobile platform, there remains a very important task - to ensure that application creators spend their resources on and for versions. As we can see, even such a giant as Microsoft does not do very well.
It so happened that everyone whose life and work are connected with technology believe that this is a good competitive world, where technology companies are fighting for users in normal ways. We ourselves didn’t believe until the last moment that we would have to call for resolving the situation of the regulator. For the first time, our faith faltered when we saw how Google’s distribution worked. If you use Mozilla Firefox, then you know that the development team of this product has always thought about the preferences of users. The browser took into account that there is Russia, Japan, South Korea, where most people use local search engines. And suddenly, Mozilla signs a three-year agreement with Google for the unconditional distribution of its search everywhere. The person who used Yandex in Russia, after the upgrade, had to look for how to regain his usual search. And not everyone could do it.
In my fantasies, of course, I think: it would still be good for a person at any moment to easily change the default search engine. Now, theoretically, he can do it, but the manufacturer’s settings are buried so deeply that not everyone can cope with it. Can you name a way to change the default search without looking at the device? I'm sure not. But many buyers of the Android-phone never look into the settings and as a result get it exactly the way the manufacturer created it, bound hand and foot with contracts from Google. And there will be nothing except Google, and not because it is beneficial to the user, but because Google is beneficial to use a dominant position in one market to put pressure on another. The ban on this is the basis of antitrust laws. Without competition, no products will develop. In this sense, Yandex and Google are simply necessary for each other. You have no idea how the quality of Google services in Turkey began to grow when we entered this country. Until Google saw competition in the Turkish search, it did nothing. After seeing live competitors for several months - and for search engines this almost instantly - improved the search literally several times, launched several new services, previously inaccessible to residents of Turkey.
Probably the only product for which many people may not like Yandex is Yandex.Bar. But it seems everyone who laughed at the joke about a girl who is easy to persuade, just do not remember that just recently it was impossible to install Flash, OpenOffice, a bunch of Sun and Java products without unchecking the "Install Google Toolbar" checkbox. This is a war that we did not start, but alas - we were forced to get involved in it, and the illusions of fair technological competition began to slowly disperse. And now the situation has passed all reasonable boundaries.
We already live in a world where the operating system is not only in computers and phones, but also watches, cars, airplanes, fire extinguishing systems. And if it turns out that it will be the same OS, then it would be desirable that not all of it was controlled by a single company. I still believe that Google has enough technical experts who understand the incorrectness of what is happening. Therefore, I am sure that it can still end well.
We appealed to the regulator, FAS, to return equal relations in the market of mobile devices. Our appeal - the recognition of one unpleasant fact. You and I have all the chances to get into the world, where only one company will decide who will get the opportunity to bring services to people and what these people can use.
We always believed in the competition and the right to choose the user. So much so that even in our search results from the first days of Yandex’s existence, there are links to other popular search engines. To be honest, I was always sure that Google believes the same thing. What is the company of engineers producing cool products. Alas, it is now clear that in addition to the technical company, which once considered its slogan “Do not be evil”, now there is a completely different one - a company controlled by lawyers and businessmen.
')
Android has long looked completely open. And it certainly does not look like the open competition policy of Google on this platform. For example, now we are faced with the fact that vendors, in order to sell phones with Yandex services in Russia, must abandon all Google services not only in Russia, but in all other countries. At the same time, the rules for receiving GMS and Google Play for each of them may change at any time.
In an open OS, we want the terms and licenses to be open and transparent to everyone.
Thanks to its brilliant programmers and excellent technology, Google has been able to conquer almost the whole world. However, there are still very few places where local services are more popular. Local players live alongside their users, and it seems that this helps them a lot to create products so that they remain stronger than global ones. It's easy for me to talk about Yandex, but let's take another example. Compare the completeness of the 2GIS directory for Russia and Google Maps or the number of active Russian users on VKontakte and Facebook. It is logical that the manufacturers of phones and tablets want their offspring to take into account the peculiarities of the market in which they will be sold. Explay, Prestigio and Fly, for example, wanted this, but at the end of last year, at the insistence of Google, they had to abandon the pre-installation of Yandex services. This happened when it came to the understanding that the devices of these manufacturers began to occupy a significant share in the Russian market of mobile devices.
I read a lot of comments on this story and, to my surprise, I found out that even intelligent adults do not always understand what the current situation threatens. In fact, now the owner of an “open operating system” makes vendors refuse to work with those who compete with Google in any markets. And I'm not even talking about how Yandex threatens it, but about the position in which it puts both developers and users.
Google bought Android almost ten years ago. During this time he has come a long way and not only technically. Around the middle of this path, an important trend emerged - Google began to saturate Android with its services and applications that simply had to be pre-installed on each device. This search, and maps, and geolocation tools. Just think: just three years ago, there were only nine such mandatory services. Now there are almost 20 of them . The fact that a technology company wants to create more good services may not be bad in itself. The problem is that its services are preinstalled on phones and tablets, largely due to the fact that the manufacturer cannot put anything else on them. Android is becoming increasingly surrounded by public and not-so-called agreements, more and more closed. All this is rapidly beginning to remind me of the story of Windows.
Let us return for a minute to 1999 and recall a completely similar situation. More than 95% of the personal computer market is running Windows, an integral part of which is Internet Explorer 5 (and a little later, and if you're lucky, 5.5 and 6). What do we know about this browser? That it was the worst browser in the history of the Internet. Technological shackles in which we were forced to impose nested tables. Even Microsoft employees admit that it was terrible. This will last another ten years - until 2009, when the European Union forced Microsoft to offer European users a choice of browsers when they first started. And Google, along with Opera and Mozilla, actively participated in the unfair competition proceedings against Microsoft.
You can ask - for what reason? After all, Microsoft created Windows. Why they could not pre-install their browser in the system? The fact is that many people did not understand that there are any alternatives. They bought the device and it already had a browser. Also today they buy an Android phone and use only what they already have. Many users are sure that the phone is sold ready to use and never look in Google Play to install other programs.
The results of the “European Commission against Microsoft” case gave a huge impetus to the development of new Internet technologies. In fact, today's success of Google Chrome is largely due to the very antitrust decision. Of course, WebKit, Blink and Chromium in general, all this code base are good technological products, but nobody knew about them, and therefore it was extremely difficult to develop them.
Look at the graphics . The share of Google Chrome has become more active since December 2009, when people in Europe were able to choose a browser. At the same time, Firefox and Opera’s shares crawled upwards . The competition has become real and, as always happens, made browsers get better and better. Won all of this. Browser developers were able to show their product to users. And they, in turn, were surprised to find that browsers have stepped far forward. Website developers began to live in the new web, with modern, convenient and, most importantly, developing standards. And even the victim Microsoft won - it allowed the company to focus and release a completely different IE. Try it, it is not so bad. The whole modern web application revolution began at the moment when the choice appeared.
What is happening now? In fact, if now you want to create applications that can be used by a large number of people, it should be available in the App Store and Google Play Market. And if Apple has a Buddhist device that is inseparable from software, then Android manufacturers are facing a choice - either Google Play and 20 pre-installed Google services, or alternative solutions and an alternative store, but for all regions without exception.
Now those who want to focus on creating search, maps or browsers, are forced to create their own alternative platforms. Approximately the same as a little more than 7 years ago, opponents of Opera, Mozilla and Google urged them to do their operating systems with their browsers and anything else. But even if someone now makes a new mobile platform, there remains a very important task - to ensure that application creators spend their resources on and for versions. As we can see, even such a giant as Microsoft does not do very well.
It so happened that everyone whose life and work are connected with technology believe that this is a good competitive world, where technology companies are fighting for users in normal ways. We ourselves didn’t believe until the last moment that we would have to call for resolving the situation of the regulator. For the first time, our faith faltered when we saw how Google’s distribution worked. If you use Mozilla Firefox, then you know that the development team of this product has always thought about the preferences of users. The browser took into account that there is Russia, Japan, South Korea, where most people use local search engines. And suddenly, Mozilla signs a three-year agreement with Google for the unconditional distribution of its search everywhere. The person who used Yandex in Russia, after the upgrade, had to look for how to regain his usual search. And not everyone could do it.
In my fantasies, of course, I think: it would still be good for a person at any moment to easily change the default search engine. Now, theoretically, he can do it, but the manufacturer’s settings are buried so deeply that not everyone can cope with it. Can you name a way to change the default search without looking at the device? I'm sure not. But many buyers of the Android-phone never look into the settings and as a result get it exactly the way the manufacturer created it, bound hand and foot with contracts from Google. And there will be nothing except Google, and not because it is beneficial to the user, but because Google is beneficial to use a dominant position in one market to put pressure on another. The ban on this is the basis of antitrust laws. Without competition, no products will develop. In this sense, Yandex and Google are simply necessary for each other. You have no idea how the quality of Google services in Turkey began to grow when we entered this country. Until Google saw competition in the Turkish search, it did nothing. After seeing live competitors for several months - and for search engines this almost instantly - improved the search literally several times, launched several new services, previously inaccessible to residents of Turkey.
Probably the only product for which many people may not like Yandex is Yandex.Bar. But it seems everyone who laughed at the joke about a girl who is easy to persuade, just do not remember that just recently it was impossible to install Flash, OpenOffice, a bunch of Sun and Java products without unchecking the "Install Google Toolbar" checkbox. This is a war that we did not start, but alas - we were forced to get involved in it, and the illusions of fair technological competition began to slowly disperse. And now the situation has passed all reasonable boundaries.
We already live in a world where the operating system is not only in computers and phones, but also watches, cars, airplanes, fire extinguishing systems. And if it turns out that it will be the same OS, then it would be desirable that not all of it was controlled by a single company. I still believe that Google has enough technical experts who understand the incorrectness of what is happening. Therefore, I am sure that it can still end well.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/250887/
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