eBay Experiment Demonstrates Frailty Of Google's Monopoly
from the switch dept
For the past several days, Larry Dignan has been seeing what it's like to live without Google. Each day, he's been trying different, lesser-known search engines to see how they stack up. As he points out, this is essentially what eBay decided to do when it announced that it would cease Adwords spending on Google in the US market, at least for the time being. While the move may have been linked to Google's planned "protest" at an eBay conference (it's now been canceled), it should still be an interesting and worthwhile experiment for eBay to see what life without Google is like. At the moment, analysts expect eBay to take some sort of business hit, although it's not clear how big it will prove to be. If it's too big, you can expect eBay to quietly scurry back to Google. That being said, both Dignan's and eBay's experiment demonstrate something important about Google's competitive standing. As powerful as it is, there's still very little lock in. If an individual or company wants to stop doing business with Google this very instant, they can. People stick with Google, not because it's hard to switch away, but because they don't see any better alternatives. Compare this to Microsoft during its heyday (or even now). It would be virtually impossible for a business that ran Windows to try going without Microsoft for a week or a quarter, just as a business experiment. This means that even when there are superior alternatives to Microsoft products, it's hard to get people to switch to them -- a fact that has underpinned many of the legal challenges against the company. These Google-free experiments should hearten anyone that fears the company's power or thinks we've just traded one monopoly for another. When a superior alternative does arise, it won't be hard for anyone to switch.
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Google Auctions?
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Re: Google Auctions?
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doesn't make much sense to me
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Re: doesn't make much sense to me
The word weakness may not be the correct term to use - but the article above makes it valid that google services being web-based for the most part allow for the possibility of competition where as microsoft has a very solid maniacal around it's business base - nearly preventing any user switch over regardless of what and how MS decides to conduct it's business.
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Re: doesn't make much sense to me
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Re: doesn't make much sense to me
the reason you dont "get it" is because your analogy is flawed.
eBay has consistently been one of the _biggest_ advertisers on Google. In fact, there were rumors that key reason that eBay bought Shopping.com was because Shopping.com's AdWords bids kept pushing eBay's AdWords bids higher. By taking out Shopping.com, eBay would then be able to spend a lot less money on Google ads.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20070613/140050.shtml
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Re: Re: doesn't make much sense to me
so it's not only google losing out on ebay's money, it's google getting less money from ebay competitors who don't have adwords auctions jacked up quite so high. i bet it's an interesting ripple for google to watch.
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Re: doesn't make much sense to me
The entire gas industry does not consist of Shell in the same way that entire search engine industry does not consist of Google.
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Re: doesn't make much sense to me
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Re: doesn't make much sense to me
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As the saying goes...
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Whatever!
...And then we will watch this new "superior alternative" flourish and grow only for the peons to start calling it a monopoly and begin bad mouthing it like they do everything else (Microsoft, Google, Wal-Mart, etc.) that's useful to us regular folk.
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Re: Whatever!
Well sure, there's ReactOS, but it's not exactly ready for prime time.
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Re: Re: Whatever!
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Makes sense
Microsoft is more like the local cable company.. You only really have one choice.
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Wow! You've discovered the free market economy!
That shouldn't be such a revelation. That's the foundation of a free market economy, and the basis of our economic system!
You use Microsoft as an example claiming that they have a lock even where better products exist. This is partially flawed. While Microsoft certainly has an unfair (and very unique) advantage in the OS market, I contend that in the vast majority of product categories Microsoft makes (get the flame throwers ready) the easiest to learn, implement, and administer products (This comes from a guy with an apache/Debian web server and a half built MythTV box sitting in my office).
While MS products might not be, overall, the most flexible, or open source. They are, for the most part, light years ahead of open source products in terms of usability.
Ease of use is at the top of the list for most end users.
I contend that if a company, like Google, that most people have a high amount of trust in, were to come out with an easy to use product that competed with MS, they would have a very real chance of competing in the market place. (see Picasa, Google Earth, Firefox(although google was late to get on the bandwagon))
This is not a revelation, just capitalism and the free market at work.
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ebay ads suck
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Doesn't matter what the end results are....
What should scare them is what US West (aka Quest) learned 20 years ago. "20% of their customers would leave simply if they had a choice". This is not from dissatisfaction, or issues with the company. That many would be willing to leave "just cause".
In Google's World, they are very much like MS. Customers have had a choice to stay or leave since their inception. Yet there hasn't been any "real" choice (in terms of a desktop replacement OS). MS is however just now realizing how fragile their Monopoly is. With Linux popularity growing, Ubuntu putting on a tremendous show for a Linux Desktop, Apple just inches away from making their OSX wintel compatible, and the threat of Web Apps becoming very real - MS is realizing that locked in customers have no loyalty.
Google has enjoyed tremendous user loyalty from the start - partially because they were the little guy, and continued to be perceived as the little guy even after they were a multi-billion dollar company.
But the Google that was is not the Google that is. The two companies are vastly different and the "Do No Evil" company is now driven by profit and market control. (Google Marketing is broken down into small 12 person work-groups and each group is expected to bring in more money than most small companies dream of).
There are options to the Google search engine in the same way that there were options to Microsoft Windows XP in 2000 - they existed but they weren't desirable.
Google should hear the cry and put some brain power into solving the problem. It is true that they won't be all things to all people. But it is also true that they are not likely to gain much market share because they already dominate it so much. They only have one way to go grow - down.
The best they can be hopeful for is that the market itself continues to grow - which lucky for them is growing faster than projected.
-CF
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It's something I have always found pretty amusing.
I think it goes to show that perhaps the way eBay did it's ad buy were not very efficient in terms of cash/benefit.
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It all has to do with a loss of data and switching from a known interface, to an unknown interface. Bussinesses cannot switch from Windows to Linux (or even Linux to Windows) because of a loss of productivity and data, the same reason that it would be difficult for a person to switch from gmail to yahoo mail. Even this is rather simplified.
Comparing operating systems to a search engine and how easy it is to switch products doesn't make much sense.
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