Yahoo! employee and famed blogger Jeremy Zawodny understands that whoever is going to beat Google is going to do so not by beating them at their own game -- search and information retrieval -- but rather by changing the game to make something else important. He quotes this insightful post from the Carnage4Life blog:

Well, I think increasing a search engine's relevance to become competitive with Google's is a good goal but it is a route that seems guaranteed to make you the Pepsi to their Coke or the Burger King to their McDonalds. What you really need is to change the rules of the game, the way the Apple iPod did.

Essentially, those two sentences point to an age old truth about innovation in business: if you're looking to dethrone an established market incumbent, you need a disruptive innovation that will change the way the game is played. If you're the market leader, you benefit from incremental improvments -- also known as sustaining innovations -- to your existing product line.

Google is not going to lose to a company that outperforms the company at its core competence of search and information retrieval. Instead, it's going to lose to a company that can develop a new competence that can serve as a substitute for search and information retrieval competences, and is compelling enough to attract Google's audience away from Google.

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