Re: The new man
"To take Youtube as an example, there is nothing stopping a rival video service gaining massive traction overnight"
... but...
"The thing about Google at the minute is it's a dominant force in search"
... which is probably the single biggest obstacle to rival video services. These days, we don't "search the web" for stuff - we "google" it. So where is this hypothetical average man going to go to find the video he's looking for? Google.
So all Google need to do is keep an eye to the competition and massage their search results so that anyone who looks like they're starting to erode YouTube's share by any significant margin slowly starts to slip down the search rankings... and the New World Order is restored.
Until Google's effective stranglehold over web search is broken, they will be in a position to control what happens with competitors to their other services. And this breaking of the stranglehold is not a technological issue - rather, it needs to happen in people's minds. I had a rather depressing incident a while ago where someone I was explaining something to did not understand what I meant by "searching the web" until I actually used the phrase "google it"...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
