Crastinate

For all those who haven’t heard yet, Yahoo entered into a partnership with Google that will effectively make Google the ultimate king of search advertising (just in case it wasn’t before). Google can monetize search much better than any company on the planet. So even with Yahoo giving up a portion of their revenues to Google, they should still make more money than if they were doing it themselves.

So the obvious question here, is this a good thing? The obvious answer is NO! This deal eliminates any potential competition for Google in search marketing. A monopoly in any market is always bad.  On the other hand, this might not turn out badly for consumers or businesses. Dominance in technology is extremely hard to hold onto. Former incredibly dominant companies include Microsoft, Palm, AOL, Yahoo, Sony…do I need to go on? The bigger a company gets, the more of a target they become.

The majority of people started their experience with the web through AOL. People didn’t understand how the web worked. They just knew that they sign onto AOL and can email, chat, and do whatever else we all used to do on AOL. At some point, the majority gained a better understanding of the web and learned that they don’t need AOL to do what they want to do online. They can access the web through any ISP and get the same information. AOL, as a gateway, became pointless. Through Internet Explorer’s dominance/monopoly, users developed a similar relationship with IE. They felt that they can use any ISP but IE was their connection to the web. Users learned more, and now understand that any browser can get them there.

Google holds that place in the many user’s minds at this point in time. It’s a gateway to the information they want. Google, however, doesn’t hold that information. The information is out there for anyone to organize and spit back to us. Google’s algorithm is good when compared to it’s competitors, but it’s not SO much better. There is a very good chance that a competitor will come along in the next decade and show us how Google is a gateway, and we don’t need them to get the information we need. Check back for an update in 10 years. We’ll see if I was right.

Ely Rosenstock