It’s all about the business model. Google has become so powerful because it, rather than any of the previous dot com wunderkind, discovered how to monetize the Internet. It’s obvious in retrospect. Monetization is done by adverts, but it was Google that got the advertizing technology more right than anyone else. The point was to be less invasive rather than more.

If Yahoo had understood this, it would have sewn up the whole game before Google even got its running shoes on. The “don’t be evil” mantra of Google sums up what now seems obvious, but wasn’t so obvious. Last time I was shown stats on this, Google was achieving a phenomenal level of click-throughs for the adverts on its search pages - about 1 in 5 of every link clicked was on an advert.

Once it had established Ad Sense, Google had a platform that managed to attract more than 50% of all web advertising. It’s a remarkable achievement. It’s also the barrier that Microsoft will have to leap if it is ever to challenge Google in its home market.

Microsoft makes lots of noise about how it will achieve this, and there’s no doubt that it is scattering money all over its project teams to this end. But, sadly for Microsoft, it’s just too hard. In order to do this, it will have to “eat it’s own children” - not only challenge Google directly, but also monetize its own office products through advertizing.

It just isn’t in Microsoft’s behavior to evolve that way.

So next year it’s likely that the ad revenues on the Internet will rise by more than 50% and that means that Google, without having to do anything new, will see its revenues grow by more than 50%. It is just as unfair as when the PC market was growing like crazy and Microsoft could watch its revenues rise without needing to do anything. Microsoft has become IBM, and Google has become Microsoft.

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