Santiago Bilinkis l Risk and Reward - Trying to live a life out of the comfort zone

I remember several years ago, when Yahoo had emerged as the clear cut winner from the many search engines available early on. Left behind were others such as Altavista, Infoseek and many others. I also remember the day when I read about this new start up called Google, which had just launched another search engine . Yahoo was already publicly traded at the Nasdaq, had tons of money, the best engineers and an extremely high share of all the searches in the planet. At that time I thought: “It’s absurd. No one can challenge the Yahoo supremacy among search engines”.

Now, a few weeks ago, Guillermo Riera, a friend of mine from high school, wrote a post in his blog about what seems to be the beginning of the end for Yahoo. And how right he is!

Looking at the stats of this first month on my blog, out of the visitors that arrived via search, almost came from Google and only 3% from Yahoo. MSN holds the remaining 1%.

In about the same old days, the winner of the battle of the browsers was already clear: Netscape (which had beaten pioneers such as Chamaleon and Opera). But Internet Explorer was profiting all the power of Microsoft to try and displace it. And the fight lasted very little, IE becoming the forever unchallenged king of browsers. Forever? Think again!

Despite all the huge Microsoft machinery and the ability to distribute it preinstalled with the Operating system (still) running on the absolute majority of computers in the World (83% of all visitors of the blog use Windows, versus 13% Mac), Firefox decided to challenge its leadership. “They are nuts- I thought.- No one can beat the Explorer as a browser anymore”. NOT!

Even if this time it’s a close one, Firefox beats IE, at least among my visitors, being used by 50%, while 41% are Gates-faithful. And two days ago Google entered the court with Chrome…

So many times before I was sure certain battles on the internet were won and settled for good. Now I learned: I don’t know how long it will take, but one day in the not so distant future a startup founded by ordinary entrepreneurs like ourselves anywhere in the Globe will declare war on the big guys and will kick Google out of search supremacy. And someone else will do the same with Firefox. There are no industries where the incumbents are so strong it is not worth getting into anymore. Encouraging, huh?

Photo: The Beggining of the End, by alopezruiz