But companies still have to make money, so there are limits to how much they can provide free. Not a problem for Google. Its core advertising business is so powerful, dominant and profitable that it can subsidize almost everything else the company does, using Free to get customers in new markets. Is that fair, when so many of its competitors don't have a similar golden goose at the core of their operations?
The analogy is something like the semiconductor battles of the 1980s, when Japanese companies were accused of "dumping" (selling for under cost) memory chips in the U.S. market to drive out U.S. competitors.
Could Free be OK for little companies, but not really big ones? How much market share would you have to have in one market to disallow you from using Free in another?
As entrepreneur Alex Iskold has pointed out, Google is using the profits from its search advertising dominance to fund its competition with Microsoft in word processors and spreadsheets (Google Docs).Microsoft, meanwhile, is doing just the opposite: using the profits from its dominance of word processors and spreadsheets (Microsoft Office) to subsidize its competition with Google in search (Microsoft Bing). In each case, the companies are using a highly profitable paid product to make another product free, on the hopes of gaining market share by taking price off the table.
