Hmm. Trust an ex-Commodore guy to know when to "give up" -- after banging your head against monopolies at CBM and Netscape it must be nice to declare victory by a company you don't
completely hate.
So, uh, since i can't help it, let me pick at some points from
the actual article:
To reconstitute Google's full value on the destination pages, you'd have to have a network which participated in a majority of the destination landings.
It's amazing how the same provider networks that mitch and boan about carring Google/YouTube traffic (see: whiny 'net neutrality' debates) have, for the most part, dropped the ball on providing their own. Ten years ago, a few megs of ISP webspace per user was enough to keep the content market somewhat balanced; these days, the providers have mostly failed to scale that, leaving it to content-aggregators like [insert blog host here], YouTube and MySpace.
Of course, those properties being bought up by Google seems to be what inspired the whole tube-protection-manouever in the first place...
Even if a competitor such as Yahoo, MSN or Ask were to fully close the gap at this point, they would still have to overcome the final brand perception gap. [...] A few years ago an AOL researcher replicated this study in a shopping mall in Virginia with AOL Search results vs. Google.
Solution: Start with some stupid new brand name that lacks any negative baggage. Or buy up one that's been sleeping for so long that a few people vaguely remember the last time it was actually useful. (AltaVista, Deja, Excite, Hotbot, Pabst Blue Ribbon...)
Surprise...the winner of the PC market didn't actually sell PCs! How could IBM have known...
Did IBM know they were launching an easily copied design with no especially proprietary parts?
Really, while I can't complain about the market being opened (except for the part where all revenue flows to MS), IBM could've shipped just about anything with their name on it and made waves. If what they'd shipped had been anything other than a riff on fairly standardized and widely 'cloned' CP/M machines it would've given them a maintainable lead -- possibly enough of one that entirely different architectures, instead of 'clones,' would've gotten footholds playing "import car" to IBM's "GM." (...and Microchannel would've been applauded instead of canned, perhaps.
)
