One of the pendulums in business strategy is whether companies should be smaller so they can be more nimble and pursue their own destines or larger so the can be more protected from market demands and can capitalize on "synergies" with other business units.
In practice, investors usually discount larger companies for efficiency reasons. You can see this with acquisition announcements where the acquirer usually goes down in price. The synergies often fail to pay off because there aren't actually many synergies between making microwaves and running a TV network, and the sprawling empire turns into mostly independent fiefdoms.
Genuine question: what societal value would be lost if Google was erased tomorrow (all technical reliance their services was magically replaced overnight with alternatives by pixies)?
Android makes up ~70% of the global phone marketshare [1]. Google maps makes up 70% of the mapping marketshare [2]. Chrome makes up ~65% of the browser marketshare [3]. Those are three of the nine products Google has with over a billion users [4].
What drop in equivalent exists for Android? I have no desire to move to iOS.
What drop in equivalent exists for Google maps? I have used OpenStreetMap for a personal project and have tried other proprietary options. If Google maps disappeared, life would go on but I would be worse off.
What equivalent exists for Chrome? Even on desktop I prefer Chrome over Firefox. On mobile, Firefox falls far behind Chrome.
Fortunately for you, Android and Chromium are FOSS and not going anywhere. For maps there is OSM with several available frontends, Bing maps, and Apple Maps has a web version.
Interoperability is great, walled-garden integration is a trap like any sort of bundling. If someone wants to create a suite of products that work well together that's fine so long as they employ means that allow other products to integrate as well. Google has gone the other route and created a suite of products and services that integrate in ways that exclude competitors.
Yup, and that's what people want. So what is the integrated service you are saying exists that can be a drop in replacement for the way so many organizations use Google's integrated services?
There we go. So if we go back up to your first comment where you say there are separate replacements for some services, you can see that isn't really relevant since what is being discussed was a drop in replacement for Google, and not an individual service they offer.
Aside from that though, Google's offerings are not a walled garden.
