People have been predicting the downfall of Google ever since AI went mainstream.
Yet their stock price keeps going higher (even as their core product continues to deteriorate from a user POV).
The so-called “AI search engines” have close to 0% chance of dethroning Big G.
It’s not going to happen.
I’ve still yet to meet a single person IRL who has used Perplexity (despite its popularity on techbro X).
The fact that Google is going to continue to dominate is blatantly obvious.
Yet it begs the question: why do so many people think that it’s so easy to disrupt an established behemoth?
People act as if all you have to do is start something new and innovative and boom just like that you win and become rich forever.
History doesn’t remember losers
Part of the reason is because the most successful Disruptors in history are all household names, and the story of how they won has become a cautionary tale about the dangers of hubris and failing to adapt to the times.
Think of legendary incumbent/disruptor battles like Netflix vs. Blockbuster.
No one wants to be the guy who says with a straight face “no way people will stream videos online. They love going into stores and paying late fees.”
Or “no way the internet will ever amount to anything.”
The stories about the people Who Didn’t See It Coming sound so ridiculous in hindsight that no one wants to risk becoming one of them in the future.
So they just always claim the new thing will win as a way to protect their own reputation/ego.
There’s another more deep™ reason, one that’s rooted in the core of what it means to be human.
We all get older every day. No matter what anyone says, no one likes it.
Everyone’s worst fear is being the out-of-touch old dude who keeps clinging to the past while the world passes him by.
The world keeps revolving around the sun and as it does so each and every one of us gets closer and closer to our own personal apocalypse.
Always siding with the bright new shiny object serves as a denial-of-death mechanism.
Like a 47yo driving around in a bright-red convertible, it makes you feel like you’ve still got it, like you’re the only person in the history of the universe who is immune to the effects of Father Time.
“I will never be the old guy sitting in his rocking chair, refusing to accept that things change and longing for a world that’s never coming back”.
The problem is that if you adopt the “new thing always wins” ideology you’ll almost always be wrong.
Winners keep on winning
Incumbent monopolies withstand disruptor onslaughts every day. They crush the ones they can crush and buy out the ones they can’t.
You never hear about these casualties unless you have some type of personal involvement with them.
They don’t become household names like Netflix or Amazon.
No one writes cheesy books with clickbait titles about them (all these books are just retelling the classic David vs. Goliath story btw, once you see it you can’t unsee it).
They just kind of fade away, like they never existed to begin with.
Trying to remember they existed is like trying to remember a fly that you swatted seven years ago. It’s impossible.
Yes, some disruptors will successfully disrupt.
When it happens everyone will look at the disrupted and wonder how it was possible that they didn’t see it coming.
But no one will ever bother trying to learn anything from the thousands+++ of wannabes who tried to step up to the king and failed.
In the case of Google vs. Perplexity et. al., I don’t see how the wannabes will win.
Google has already adopted their technology into its own product (AI Overviews).
And worse, they’re a one-trick pony.
People don’t use search engines just to get answers to informational queries. They use them to navigate to websites, they use them to find e-com stores to buy products from, they use them to try to find real reviews of products from people who’ve actually used them, etc.
The idea that being able to answer an informational query with AI slop will somehow dethrone fucking Google is hilarious.
The new crop of Google competitors will go away as soon as the AI hype cycle evaporates and it will feel like they never existed to begin with.