Winner Gives All

Rich Skrenta's analysis of Google's enough of them. When a switching cost is just a link, it is pretty damn cheap. But still, I even ran into a VC recently that couldn't copy and paste one. Tools for linking are getting better, but what is driving this cost through the pavement is the army of link literate promiscuous bloggers and wiki editors. Especially when the market for attention favors those with the new. The new lock-in tactic for raising switching costs is attention metadata. And the only things that keep it in check are privacy concerns, ownership, portability and all those things Steve Gillmor waxes poetic about. Rich goes on to advise Yahoo! to capitulate on advertising:

Yahoo should accept Google's search and monetization dominance. Yahoo will not recover the search application, and browse views are not competitive and cannot be made to be so. They should do a deal with Google for Adwords/Adsense across their entire network, as Ask Jeeves did. They should be able to obtain at least an 85% rev share; that would take them from $0.10/search to $0.17, a 70% increase in search revenue overnight. That's an extra $1.5B or so of yearly revenue being left on while they try to Asymmetric competition helped get Google where they are, but it cuts both ways. I think the answer to this question is yes, but you may have just a good answer to why. If I'm wrong, then Rich has provided us with a first draft of where anti-trust should be paying attention in a market for attention. Rich says Google marks the third age of computing, after IBM and Microsoft. When we enter into a fourth age, could it be man vs. machines? Ross Mayfield is CEO and co-founder of Ross Mayfield's Weblog which focuses on markets, technology and musings.