I had a thought today.
Google is the undisputed king of search, it’s impossible to imagine anybody unseating them.
How could they, you’d have to do better than google at searching among other things, (mostly advertising, I suppose) and be cheaper, which unless you’re planning on giving money away for searching on your website, you’re not going to be. (Those .com days are over, sadly.)
But I noticed something. While I was writing my iphone application and I kept trying to look up reference for the api and other things I had a really hard time finding information in google because mac gets such a relatively small percentage of the development market.
But more importantly: google failed. And where they failed, somebody else can succeed.
So indeed it is not impossible to unseat the king (I mean it never has been, it just takes time) but here,
we can see an instance of a crack in the glass.
It will be a long time before the industry shifts away from what google does best and have them also be too big to be nimble about catching the next wave, but it will eventually happen. But maybe just maybe you can already see the shimmer start to fade.
Then again I’ve been saying the shimmer has been fading since they said “we’re not evil.” Please.