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
Agreed, but for different reasons. The ISPs/carriers were focussed on providing network connectivity/internet access, not a network based "service" (or application, if you like). A search engine and its resultant traffic was, frankly, considered little more than a sort of super-dns server for information queries. A glorified archie or gopher. No one could have foreseen the impact it would have. My personal opinion is that the "whining" now is akin to that of sore losers who didn't enter the race, because like everyone else they didn't realise there was a race.
Oh, and add in the fact that many carriers/ISPs are little more than resellers, and dont actually have a physical network anyway...
As for user space, well, most ISPs are desperate to restrict bandwidth and cap traffic in order to minimise traffic. And in the advent of higher bandwidth network services being deployed, too*. You expect them to actually increase the storage available to an individual user??? That costs *real* money.
*Typical example. Take a 2mb uncapped line, one could pull down several hundred gb data a month. On an 8mb line, that figure leaps to a couple of terrabytes. But when one is capped at 50gb/month, extra costing £1.50/gb.... do you see a somewhat DOH! situation...
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...)
Brand perception is darned difficult to overcome, which is the biggest challenge facing any newcomer to the market, negative baggage or not. If I launch lewsearch tomorrow, even with a phenomenal search engine, it would be an uphill struggle to dethrone Google. And thats just to entice search users. To 'acquire' some of their business customers would be even harder.
In the blog entries there are some allusions to a "new google" with superior technology/application/relevancy/focus. But they face the same obstacle - overcomming perception, inertia, and Mr-average: in the same way we *know* ADOS and Linux are superior to XP, the average user doesn't. They do "know" (are comfortable with) Win9x/2000/XP/Outlook/ie/Office though
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.
I think you might have missed his point. He wasn't alluding to the hardware side of it, nor what happened to IBM (the winners in the PC *hardware* market are Dell and Intel). Rather, I think the author meant the *overall* winner of the PC market is MS; regardless you buy hardware from Dell, IBM, Asus etc, you end up with MS.
