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by DenisM 2756 days ago
Large companies rise, and then fall to clear up the space for the next aspiring large company. It's Google's natural destiny to fall, too.

Interestingly, the lifetime of a company is directly tied to the attention span of its customers. As long people come to the store asking for Coca Cola the company will endure, so this is probably generational. Enterprise software sticks around, so does Oracle. Internet consumer technology promotes attention span that's measured in seconds, Google can come crashing down quite suddenly.
1 comments
majewsky 2756 days ago
The search engine is still very profitable, though, so that would curb the fall. (Or did I miss some news there?)
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DenisM 2756 days ago
My point was rather that Google search may not be that sticky.

Coca Cola is sticky through brand advertising, business deals, product placement, etc. Pretty much all that money spent by people on bottles of the sugary water was pumped into marketing, not into manufacturing. Over decades this created a very firm image in the people's heads, and the only way to dislodge it is to create a new brand for younger consumers (which Coca Cola will purchase as soon as it shows traction).

ERP software is deeply ingrained into business processes, removing it is akin to removing a person's neural system. The only way to dislodge that is to address up-and-coming companies, having them build their processes around a new paradigm.

You can't just beat any of this via superior quality product, they have "a moat" [1]

Google doesn't have that loyalty, and it's not that deeply ingrained. They ride on their default placement in Chrome/iOS and on the search result quality (which stems from quality engineering and superior scale yielding large data sets). If someone used NLP to build a more relevant search engine (of course serving more relevant ads), it won't be long before that new search engine starts using their revenue to pay higher $$ amount to hardware manufacturers to make a new engine the default. It's a shaky ground, and it's why Google is re-inventing itself and AI company - if they don't then someone else will. There is some strength in Google's name itself, but I'm not sure it can match to the visceral reaction to an addictive sugary drink.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/05/economicmoat.asp

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