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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Is Google "doing it" really on the list of concerns for most startups? They do web scale computation really, really well. They have a nifty email client. They're the world's best advertising firm. And, oh yeah, search. Outside of those competencies... their record of success is underwhelming.

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I don’t think it’s a concern of most startups but it’s definitely one of most VCs. I think most VCs were either active as VCs or working in the industry back in the late 90s when Microsoft entering a market meant the death knell for any other company in that market. So that fear has carried over into today with Google taking Microsoft’s place as the dominant company in the industry.

The fact that Google hasn’t been near as successful at entering new markets doesn't seem to have entered the equation.

Its a concern for investors. They annoyingly ask this question quite often.

I'm sure that's what Streetmap and Multimap thought.

EDIT: and any web traffic analytics company you care to mention.

The analytics example at least is really flakey ... plenty of web analytics companies didn't close up shop after Google's transformation of Urchin, a few years later they're still running and new ones are still emerging.

Google fails at a lot more than they succeed at. Chances are very good if Google enters a market they'll suck at it, and if you excel at it maybe they'll buy you if they want to own that market.

All you even have to do to beat them is provide any way for people to reach you for support.

Part of this is also due to the fact that the analytics business is so multi-faceted and had many valuable niches. That fact, combined with the increasing volume and variety of data people need to understand, makes the industry even more viable as time goes by.

Absolutely, I'm doing it for games and with quite some success.

But I think there's more to it than just that analytics is a particularly versatile industry, most of the stuff Google does could be retooled to solve x (or a variation of x) for a different y - and has: redtube, 5mins etc - let alone the also viable same y but better solution.

If it's not one of their handful of monolithic and to date unbeatable successes then their presence in a market really doesn't do anything more than validate it.

Not really sure I agree with the analytics example. There see tons of analytics startups (including my own).

Another example is Skyhook. Google started doing wifi based location while driving street view and then forced them out by threatening to cut people who used them off from the official Google apps. Not only did "Google do it" but they also leveraged their position to destroy an open market for wifi location services.

Multimap sold out to MS for $50 million, so I'm not sure they cared too much about Google.

Omniture?

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