The WWW Monopoly

On most markets there are favorite brands that has the full attention and fascination of consumers. This competition hierarchie is not at all uncommon and perhaps even the only alternative for any industry today. But the reason for this consumer concetration can also be due to consumer habbits. Of course, the best product or service will get the most attentions and companies like Coca-Cola, YouTube and Wal-Mart indeed deliver more enhanced products that their competitors. But sometimes the line between market leader and second best is thin, almost impossible to see. The online business, to me, seems full of such examples and I can't help but think that consumer loyalty and straight layzeness is the cause why so many sites have the monopoly in their niche. If we would only bother to google a bit more for alternative e.g video hosts and communities YouTube and Facebook wouldn't be able to take their domination for granted. Or maybe we need to encourage more people to start own video hosts and online platforms. Maybe then there wouldn't only be 1 site in monopoly for each market.

Add Your Thoughts

Commented by: Sebastian Freh, 11 August, 2008

Even though I really like standards that makes Internet a better place, I totally agree with you. I really hope that there is another really good search engine coming up soon that can compete with Google. I think that there has to be a light-weighted search engine (like Google was in the beginning). Yahoo and Microsoft already have a big backpack of gnarly features that a newer version has to support. They will never be able to compete...

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