Until now every company has had a weakness. Namely, dominance in some other market could be used to undercut them on price. The way to battle such companies has been to undermine their dominant market, or use the same strategy with a different market. Advertising is so unquantifiable at the moment that you can't undermine Google's market by simply selling advertising more cheaply. You could try to make a better search, but at some point Google wont be so depending on search for their ad revenue.
The thing that is scary about Google is they have unlimited pockets. They can just continue throwing money away until they've taken over every market they care to. And then they can recoup those losses...
Substitute Google with Microsoft and the products with MS products (say, Windows and Office) and you would have a common doomsday monopoly prediction ca. 1998. You can probably do the same with IBM before MS, but I'm too young to know.
20 years from now you'll wonder what you were so afraid of. Google is in its golden age, but it won't last forever.
But MS had exactly the weakness I was talking about. If someone gives away their OS for free what will you do? Giving away advertising for free wont affect anything.
Presumably they have a weakness. As you say, it's hard to quantify what they're doing, but that just means we don't have an easy way to figure it out. It still has statistics, limits and numbers, even if only their accountants have a good handle on what those are.
Well, in this case no one has a handle on the numbers yet. If you don't advertise at all and you have zero customers, then you advertise with google and get 100 customers, then the value is easily quantifiable. But it's never that cut and dry. How much value is e.g. HP getting from google?
If you can't know what the actual value of the service is, how can you make decisions about who is cheaper? Is bing cheaper? Maybe, but what about after you consider the vastly decreased exposure? How much does that matter?
I still think the only way to beat google today is to make a better search engine. Tomorrow that wont work either.
