Google's Unsticky

An Amazon.com-related company (A9.com) recently introduced their own search "portal" type application at http://www.a9.com/. I tried it out and switched very quickly once I determined that the a9.com search results were just as good as google.

Similarly, Shandelle is doing pay-per-click advertising for her little business (http://www.buysparklers.com/). She doesn't stick to one ad vendor. Instead, she spreads it amongst different vendors including Overture.

Web advertising is google's main source of revenue. But, neither end of that equation has such a low switching cost? That's disturbing.

Hugely profitable sustainable businesses have high degrees of lock-in. Microsoft's monopolies of Windows and Office derive from the applications running on them and the standardization of files stored in their format respectively. Ebay has legions of buyers and sellers networked together. And so on such that both companies can raise their prices almost at will, with little or no price pressure from competitors.

Other businesses are profitable, but they don't have the same lock-in. For example, Amazon.com is a profitable business but customers aren't inherently forced into buying there by the same forces. Yahoo/Overture is similar -- they provide a valuable service to people but aren't free to increase their prices as it's relatively easy to find a replacement product at a lower price.

The difficulty with Google is that it's priced as if it is an Ebay or a Microsoft, rather than as a Yahoo. Friday's closing price has them at a market cap of $31.87 billion and a P/E of 162.50. People seem to assume that the strength of the google search engine will continue to allow them to dominate people's eyeballs for web searches ad infinitum. The problem is: what happens when Microsoft puts out a search engine that is just as good? It will take them time, but they will do it sooner or later.