[woofie11]

I think search will be quick. There isn't much stickiness there. It will be a disruptive S-curve, as soon as an upstart starts gaining traction.

Given how much of a cash cow that is for Google, I think when that happens, things will spiral. I'm not sure what this spiral will look like -- it's different for each company -- but an example:

* Revenue goes down.

* Beancounters at Google can't continue to offer $500k compensation, especially when so much of that are RSUs.

* A lot of top engineers company-wide leave for greener pastures. Worse decisions get made company-wide.

* Google finds it needs more money, and starts milking its customers more effectively. Data privacy goes down. Pricing goes up. Etc.

* Customers start to leave for free offerings from vendors with leaner cost structures.

... and so on.

I think a little bit of this kicked off when the qualified executives left. Schmidt/Larry/Sergey were quite good.

Fundamentally, though, Google seems brittle right now. It has a massive cost structure, which leaves them vulnerable (the problem isn't salaries; it's headcount). It's too big to be nimble. And it's not nearly as competent as it used to be. Or as it's competitors. Amazon and Apple are both more competent and more nimble.

[bachmeier]

> I think search will be quick. There isn't much stickiness there. It will be a disruptive S-curve, as soon as an upstart starts gaining traction.

It's unlikely that any other company will outcompete Google on search. What will happen is that something better than search will come along. That wouldn't be hard, given that today's search tends to return a combination of useless garbage and paid results. A better system will emerge - it has to, because what we have today is so bad.

[woofie11]

> It's unlikely that any other company will outcompete Google on search.

Why?

I understand Google has a big database, but note that we're talking products, not just technologies. A "good enough" product in one dimension can still disrupt existing products if it's better in other dimensions.

[gameman144]

I think this is the point; what we call search today is likely to be dominated by Google, but what we call search tomorrow could be dominated by a newcomer. For instance, map-based search is already a huge step above traditional Google searches for real-world locations and there's no reason to think there won't be more significant shifts in the future as well.

[woofie11]

What we call search was dominated by Altavista before Google. It really didn't take much to break that dominance.

Stable dominance is characterized by things like network effects or similar. Google, despite being willing to use anticompetitive tactics, hasn't really successfully built much of a moat.

Bing didn't do it since at the time, everyone liked Google and hated Microsoft, and Google was an epsilon better.

Today, Google doesn't have that do-no-evil reputation, and it's hard to know what would happen.