Microsoft wasn't a monopoly because their software pervaded rampantly; Microsoft was a monopoly because their entire business model bastardized the notion of vertical integration by making alternate software (ie competition) impossible, furthered by the costs of developing IE being (allegedly) baked into Windows.
Is the "Google = Monopoly" argument that their bundling of GMail/Search/Plus/etc./etc. is discouraging competition?
Yes, you're missing something, but it's a common thing to miss. What's illegal and immoral isn't the mere possession of a monopoly. What's illegal and immoral is the abuse of a monopoly position to shut out competition, corner the market, then raise prices above what a free market would bear.
Microsoft was a monopoly because they sold 95+% of the operating systems on computers. Microsoft was convicted not of being a monopoly, but of abusing the monopoly.
It is also interesting to observe that while Microsoft may have done some immoral things to obtain that monopoly (depending on how you look at it), that doesn't make the things they did before they had a monopoly illegal, or at least not for reasons of having a monopoly. Special scrutiny and rules are put in place for monopolists. Thus, it became illegal to bundle IE with Windows in some places, but that was a special ruling for MS only as a consequence of their monopoly status, it was not a general legal restriction against bundling.
The claim that Google is a monopoly on search is simply an observation that they are servicing the vast, vast majority of searches. It does not logically follow that they are doing anything wrong; that is something that must be established separately. I for one don't see much evidence for Google abusing their monopoly in illegal or immoral ways. (Most of my complaints would center more around resting on their laurels, such as with their notoriously bad customer service, but there's nothing particularly illegal or immoral about that....) It is also valid to be personally concerned about the presence of a monopoly, even if it is not doing anything particularly wrong.
The common category collapse of "monopoly" and "illegal monopoly" makes it hard to understand what's really going on.
I don't get it either. If Google turns evil, everyone can switch search engines immediately. There's no lock-in. We're free. Gmail? You can download everything. Using Windows was never like that. There was always something making it hard to switch.
If the "Google monoculture" becomes a problem for average web users, they'll change. Right now, almost nobody wants to.
"Microsoft wasn't a monopoly because their software pervaded rampantly"
Sure it was, but it's not illegal to have a monopoly. However, using your monopoly in one market to break into another, that's frowned upon. Google might have already been doing that with the promotion of Chrome on their site.
Also, Google's integration of Google+ in their search results pages sure is giving their own social network a leg up over sites like Facebook and Twitter [1]. Whether that legally means they're abusing their monopoly, I don't know.
Microsoft was a monopoly in the operating system market because they had near exclusive control of that market. Likewise, Google has near exclusive control of the search market. The term "monopoly" doesn't require abuse.
I think the point of the article is to say that Google isn't abusing their monopoly power (by many people's standards), but that Google is nonetheless a monopoly and if they delist your site or otherwise abuse their power, you no longer exist as a viable business.
We even have a recent example of this in the spat between Twitter and Google over Google+ results in search. Google is hiding behind the "you put 'nofollow' on them" line, but it seems a tad dishonest. Really, "nofollow" gets used to say "don't give them SEO points for this link". Even if one considers Google's position completely legitimate, it's also quite handy for Google. Now their Google+ service gets promoted over a competitor. Google's decision here is a use of their position to hurt a competitor.
In fact, it's a lot like the Netscape situation. There's legitimacy to not indexing the Twitter content labeled with "nofollow" or integrating your own competitor right into your product. This is the same argument that Microsoft used about Internet Explorer. When a company has 10% of the market, we don't need to scrutinize so much. They don't have a lot of power. When a company controls such a high proportion of an industry, that changes.
The author rightly identifies that if Google moves against you in their search index, it basically eliminates your business. There are always reasons. I'm glad about the moves Google has made against spammers in their index recently. However, when looking at the Twitter situation, I feel less positively. I personally don't use Twitter (or Google+), but I can recognize that Google's market dominance in search is going to hurt Twitter and promote their own competitor. Google+ may be better and there may be good technological reasons for the integration and the non-indexing of Twitter links, but when you're as dominant of search as Google is, I think a bit more scrutiny is warranted. Likewise, when Microsoft was so dominant of operating systems and started integrating their own browser into the OS, it was scrutinized. That doesn't mean there wasn't good technological reasons for the integration, just that Microsoft was of a size where it eliminates the viability of competitors.
I have a lot of respect for Google and none of this is meant to sound anti-Google. At the same time, I agree with the author's premise that Google is so dominant of search that they could eliminate the viability of your business via their search index. That doesn't mean that they would do that. However, I think it means that certain moves should be viewed as being made by the only company in the industry - not one made by a single company among many competitors. And before one says "there's lots of alternatives like Bing, DDG, etc.", Microsoft had Apple, Be, Linux, and others, but they still held the power.
The article isn't saying that Google is abusing their monopoly, just that they do have that power.
Microsoft wasn't a monopoly because their software pervaded rampantly; Microsoft was a monopoly because their entire business model bastardized the notion of vertical integration by making alternate software (ie competition) impossible, furthered by the costs of developing IE being (allegedly) baked into Windows.
Is the "Google = Monopoly" argument that their bundling of GMail/Search/Plus/etc./etc. is discouraging competition?