There's no viable alternative for either of those yet. Massive network effects around Microsoft office, and Google's only real competition is the equally-bad Bing.
Both DuckDuckGo and Kagi are, purely focused on result quality in 2025 far better than Google currently, but that does not matter if one has no need beyond the most basic results.
And much of the MS Office suite is actually a worse copy of another product, merely copied and forced via network effect. There are more than enough far better alternatives to e.g. Teams and OneDrive. The latter even makes Excel far less reliable to the point of unusability.
Not to mention Windows is easily replaced for the truly average person who spends their entire computer use inside a Chromium browser nowadays. Outside PC Gaming (which is far from the average if we are honest), the vast majority of people never touch software that isn’t already on mobile or more likely exclusively in the browser.
Familiarity and brand strength, not need or compatibility, keep the customer facing offerings of MSFT going. That isn’t inherently unreasonable either, for these people Windows is fine as Chrome works well enough on it and they do not have any needs beyond that, so why switch. Same with search, Google still finds flights, restaurants, Wikipedia, etc.
Being better is worth little if the vast majority are sufficiently well catered to by the incumbent. Even if another OS or search may improve their experience somewhat (better reliability, longer battery life, etc.) that doesn’t trounce the established player as long as the few basics aren’t utterly broken even to them.
You can actively antagonize your users, be worse than the competition, more expensive too, you only loose most if you make the few things most have purely become reliant on and are expecting worse, basically regress.
Reason all the bugs in Windows are fine, after all the memories of most people are dominated by BSODs and just not crashing daily is enough to be considered pretty good, despite the overall experience far worse than most other OS/DE combis.
You don't have to take my word for it. Open the three next to each other, type in a search query. Only one will provide part of the results as a wildly inaccurate "overview" that somehow manages to link to sources telling you the opposite or contradicts itself inside the text box, which can also not be deactivated. Those are the results you get from Google and that alone makes quality worse, pure and simple.
More subjectively, but if you want to ignore the "AI overview" and consider that not results (then why are they on my results page?!), just look for a specific, slightly older video on Youtube, a site Alphabet themselves run. You can provide the exact title down to the letter and are in many instances going to struggle to find it with Youtube search or Googles Video Search, even when wrapping in ", etc. Kagi and DDGs video search tabs meanwhile yield the desired results. Again, this doesn't mean they are amazing or massively far ahead as Google was able to reliably provide such results in the past. It just means that Google Search has regressed, yet users stuck with it because, as I've been saying, quality (or lack thereof) has a hard time overcoming brand strength.
I had DDG set as my default for years and found myself resorting back to google so often I had to finally admit to myself their results were inferior even to the diminished google result. I just didn’t seem to get the result you’re claiming on the everyday type of queries I make.
Kagi gives you free searches and you pay for Google with you data/advertisements so it costs something too, but you knew that already. And both provide more reliable results, so what are you trying to say?
Gaming on PC or using Adobe software is very far removed from the average in 2025. Same if you use any Office application after work hours. Heck, even Canva is, the vast majority of users are not creating on their systems, solely consuming and would be served more than well enough with only their phones. In countries where most of the population has gotten access after modern multitouch smartphones became a thing, most do use these over notebooks/PCs as their primary device, like India.
And friction on MacOS, Linux, ChromeOS, Android or iOS, I don’t see that considering the vast majority still switched to 10 despite the departure from a decades long established environment and, lest we forget, quite a lot of XP/98 software also did not work well on more modern Windows, again, not really a problem for these either. There is no reason not to switch despite the brand, which I again must emphasize, is ok. They are fine enough with the status quo, even though alternatives would be more stable, secure, have better battery life, etc. I just dislike the idea that some in the space cling to that better alternatives are surely going to be adopted and the only reason they aren’t by the masses is compatibility, slight differences in UI, etc.
