[JohnFen]

> ...why none of the existing competition...

You're agreeing with me here by admitting that there was existing competition. The rest of your remarks are about how much better Google's offering was to the competition, which is a point I've already agreed with.

[mythz]

That's like saying a DB search is existing competition for a Google Search, it isn't.

There were existing GEO companies that provided Mapping Services (I was developing GEO Apps with one of them at the time), but there was nothing like the consumer focused Google's Maps preceding it, with its worldwide pre-rendered imagery at multiple zoom-levels coupled with a global search that displayed annotated Markup results delivered over an Ajax Web interface that allowed seamless panning/zooming of the Earth scaled to millions of users.

It wasn't a fluke that Google Maps gained instant popularity with mainstream Internet users over everything else, there was nothing else like it.

[JohnFen]

> That's like saying a DB search is existing competition for a Google Search

If by "DB search" you mean the old-school engines like Lycos, etc., then yes, it is like saying that. And yes, I think those did count as existing competition for Google search.

I suspect that we mean different things by "competition" here...