Google at TED

I've been at the TED conference since Wednesday and am amazed at the pervasiveness of Google. Today, Steven Johnson mentioned GoogleShare. Earlier, a non-profit making a pitch asked if Google would put them on the home page. Certainly a good thing to ask since both of the founders of Google were in the audience. Over and over, the speakers (very much an early adopter/influencer crowd) are gaga over Google.

With strong profitability and a rumored summer IPO, I have to wonder how Yahoo, Overture and Microsoft (among others) are preparing for battle. Google is only a few more years of good execution and lack of strong competition away from becoming an effective monopoly. There are no natural barriers to entry, network effects or proprietary technology in the search engine space and no reason that the perfect competition (i.e., no profits) model shouldn't apply to the space. Search engines should be more like TV networks or newsweekly magazines than operating systems.

Microsoft succeeded as much because of the missteps of the competition as its own execution. So far, that's been true of Google as well. It will be interesting to see if it can continue.