I understand there are economies of scale here, but if a few investors got together what's to stop them from achieving this?
The reality is that Bing sucks. Hard. It can't even return Microsoft's knowledge base for a search term that Microsoft explicitly set up. Every time, I cut-n-paste the term into Google and that is how I resolve my question. (Of course being linked to Microsoft's own website! They wrote the software. They wrote the documentation. But their own search can't find it!)
The problem is not Google being anti-competitive here. It's Microsoft that can't compete. They don't have two employees that said "hey, we should set up a monthly sync to make sure all the help in Windows gets linked to our knowledge base in Bing" between someone on the Windows team and someone on the Bing team. And that's the kind of thing that makes your company go out of business. The government can do very little to help you with that.
Not sure if it works on all Windows 10 editions though.
In order to be disrupt Google, you don't make a better Google. You identify something Google doesn't deliver and which people care about enough to use your search engine. I don't think anyone knows right know what that hypothetical killer feature is, and most probably assume it doesn't exist.
On another level, though, incumbents have a habit of buying potential threats (which can be a pretty good deal when you're in venture capital land and need to show your shareholders high returns). Google's bought a number of companies with a different take on search over the years, such as Like.com and Clever Sense.
I think you may have replied to the wrong post, because your post doesn't make a lot of sense as a reply to the parent.
The problem arises when a company leverages a monopoly to suppress competition, implement predatory pricing, or manipulate competition in another market. Using a monopoly in search to compel tying agreements prohibiting browsers or manufacturers from including other search engines or apps would qualify. If it turns out that agents of the company (Directors, VPs, etc) internally communicated an intent to suppress competition that would be more than enough to bury them.
By that same argument, companies that aren't huge can't compete with Walmart, UPS, McDonald's, etc.
That argument basically breaks down to "Small companies can't compete against huge companies without finding a way to become huge themselves."
Isn't that just capitalism?
The same way an entire class of people (looking at you, Grandma) think that Microsoft Windows IS the computer, many people think Google IS the internet.
And to some degree they aren’t wrong.
Overcoming that perception is going to be insanely expensive and time-consuming. Not to say it shouldn’t be done. Not to say it couldn’t be done, but man, talk about an uphill battle. Especially as Google will naturally mobilize their own machine to crush this new competition.
The internet, however, is different in both the frequency of interaction and the import of being transparent.
Also, as far as I can tell, it would be an order of magnitude cheaper to start a new photocopying machine because the tricks and tactics that Xerox could ostensibly use to slow down your new startup are relatively benign.
Google controls (more or less) the way anyone, anywhere (who isn't tech-savvy) will find you as an online business. Kinda scary.
Nothing, but that's always been the case, with every monopoly. There was nothing stopping anybody from running telephone lines and competing with AT&T in the 80's except for AT&T's massive incumbency head-start.