Umair Haque asks:
Let's revisit the spectre haunting venture capital. Why aren't there more Googles?This is disingenuous. It is easy to forget that prior to google there were numerous search engines all vying for people's attention. I can recall changing from Alta Vista to Hotbot as the competing products got better and better. Google basically won on interface. In other words they didn't innovate so much, as improve an existing product. This is the normal trajectory for a successful business. There is nothing unique about Google in that respect.
Haque continues:
The answer's very simple. Because every company that had the potential to be economically revolutionary over the last five years sold out long before it ever had the chance to revolutionize anything economically. Think about that for a second. Every single one: Myspace, Skype, Last.fm, del.icio.us, Right Media, the works. All sold out to behemoths who are destroying, with Kafkaesque precision, every ounce of radical innovation within them.Meh. Google's much vaunted market dominance and verbing has come because they have improved existing products. Online ads existed before google, I can recall doubleclick doing quite well in that market, well enough that they survived the crash and were recently bought by Google. Gmail, Calendar, etc etc, they are all improvements on existing products. This is the normal path for a successful company. Haque's thesis is reliant on the internet community forgetting its own history. He may as well ask why aren't there more General Electrics?
