Stephen Baker and Steve Rubel have been speculating on who is going to take down Google (see Baker here, and Rubel here). Rubel's take is particularly interesting, since he notes that Wikipedia is next in line to take down Google.

My opinion: no way. Not a chance in hell.

My rationale:

(1) Wikipedia does not really have a business model at this point, and I don't think we're going to see a no-business model company beat a business model company any time soon. It might happen some day, but not in the forseeable future. There just isn't enough incentive to make such things big and valuable.

(2) Wikipedia has serious quality issues (see this). This is fine until you start getting big and people start becoming dependent upon you.

(3) This leads to my next point: no one is dependent on Wikipedia. The switching costs are laughably low. A fundamental principle of developing a successful business is to increase dependencies on your offering; to "lock in" your customers. They're not doing this in the least.

(4) For the most part, they don't harness network effects at all. We live in a network age -- those that win are those that build networks, and capitalize on network advantages.

So, who will beat Google? I don't think anyone has the answer to that question, although I've been trying to devise the formula for some time now. Here's what I think are some characteristics of who will beat Google:

• A company that does not specialize in technology, search, or information retrieval
• A company that does not have a PPC-based revenue model
• A company that is far more decentralized
• A company that can cultivate communities and build relationships

The idea of beating a market incumbent is the same as always: don't compete with them along their strengths; find new ones, preferably ones that your opponent is afraid of or cannot profitably compete against. In other words, you're not going to beat Google by playing Google's game; you need to change the game entirely, so that Google's game (search + PPC ad revenue) is just not that cool in comparison to what you've got.

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