Google Analytics 4
Personal opinion, Google is <i>catastrophically</i> shooting themselves in the foot here, and could lose their market dominance.<p>GA&#x27;s second-biggest moat (behind being free) is its existing install base. It&#x27;s already in place on approximately every website on the Internet. And no one wants to <i>change</i> analytics vendors, because that breaks history, which is a no-no. You want to know if your visits are up&#x2F;down vs last month or last year, you literally cannot answer that unless you are using the same tool this years as you were last year.<p>By forcing a migration to a non-compatible version, Google loses that big advantage. If you&#x27;re going to lose that <i>anyways</i>, then there&#x27;s less of a reason to stick with GA. Now you&#x27;re <i>forcing</i> people to gut-and-replace their existing data collection process, what incentive is there for people to stick with Google? One of the biggest reasons to stay with GA was just killed.<p>The timing is also exceptionally atrocious. Google is, again, forcing people to expend the effort to rebuild their analytics implementations from scratch. Meanwhile court rulings are coming down on a monthly basis enumerating different ways in which Google Analytics violates GDPR. A lot of companies might just brush off these rulings by simply doing nothing, but now they&#x27;re being forced to actively invest time and effort into Google Analytics. A lot of them are going to be doing an evaluation against privacy-conscious competitors that simply would not have happened if Google wasn&#x27;t kicking people of their existing platform.<p>The GA4 data model is also completely different from the GA Universal data model, which is an impediment to their fourth-biggest moat, the fact that every piece of BI software in the universe has a GA plug-in. Many of those plug-ins work despite not being actively maintained since 2015; the GA4 ecosystem is smaller and will take some time to recover.<p>(The third-biggest moat is Google Ads integration. I suspect that Google imagines this to be bigger than it really is in practice.)