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Comment by Niten | Hacker News Reader

But why? Really, is there any fundamental reason we should expect Google to remain perpetually on top of the search engine business?

I think the difference in quality between Google and Bing search results is negligible; at this point it's just a matter of mindshare as to whether people, on average, go to www.google.com or to www.bing.com when they want to look something up. There's no vendor lock-in propping up Google, to the extent that there is behind the Windows or iTunes monopolies. Mindshare can be altered, Microsoft just needs to figure out how to do it.

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"But why? Really, is there any fundamental reason we should expect Google to remain perpetually on top of the search engine business?"

In technology, it is rare that a leader loses it's place in the market. More often, a new technology is pioneered by a new company that makes the old technology less relevant.

IBM never lost the mainframe market, but did not dominate the PC market. Google did not take over PCs, but dominates search. There are many more examples like this.

There was a company called AltaVista that once domminated web search.

There was also a company called Novell that pretty much invented the business of networking PC's, but where are they now?

While not explicit in the parent post, I think his major point was about a leader in a mature technology field not often being replaced.

Google supplanted Altavista largely because they made huge strides in a rather new field. While it's definitely possible, it's a little hard to image someone coming along with a web search that's impressive enough to supplant Google. It's more likely that "search" would evolve into something not entirely comparable to today's search, and replace them.

For starters, Google mints its own money via Adwords, while Microsoft still depends on Yahoo Overture, which Yahoo itself (and everybody else in the industry) acknowledged being greatly inferior to Adwords, to the point that they wanted to use Adwords to make more money out of the Long Tail of search...

I don't expect Google to remain perpetually on top of the search engine business. But neither do I believe that Microsoft, as we know it today, is capable of being the company that knocks them down.

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