There are true monopolistic firms like Comcast or Time Warner, where there are serious logistic/economic barriers preventing other firms from entering the market. This doesn't seem like one of them to me.
Yahoo Search is actually powered by Bing since 2009 according to Wikipedia. Their own search engine was not competitive enough. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search
What would be worrisome is if they abuse their market position. Is there strong evidence they do this in search? It'd be more concerning if they did to promote their other products.
What a monopoly really is and whether Google qualifies is a separate question, and I'm recusing myself from commenting on this point.
I agree. It means it's a natural monopoly. These should be regulated, because otherwise there is a tendency for them to abuse their power.
> There are serious logistic/economic barriers to enter
> the search space.
Something particularly interesting about Google is that they just took the industry head-on. I'd guess that there'd be areas where you could build a kind of search engine that was better than the market leader, and focus on carving out a niche. Yandex have done just this with the Russian market. (and there's an example of a commercially-viable post-google search engine business).
But Google just went after being the leading power.
History in general, but in our space in particular, is written by small, well-coordinated teams who can repeatedly execute. If you can get that team together, you can do almost anything.
There is tremendous barrier to entry in the search space - otherwise Bing wouldn't still suck compared to Google. The point of competition is to get good enough to steal market share from the entrenched incumbents or gain new users somehow. If that doesn't happen, for whatever reason, then you don't have strong competition.
Could you explain how an operating system is a natural monopoly?
Development of a new OS isn't cheap, but isn't prohibitively expensive either. It also isn't undesirable AFAICT.
The cost of providing and OS and an entire ecosystem of device drivers and an an entire ecosystem of apps is very high.
But even if you manage to build that, the cost of training a significant percent of the population into using and developing for your platform is much higher. Getting a significant presence in the "brain space" of a population is very expensive. Having people switch to an alternative is even more expensive due to, among others, human network effects.
Driving adoption is a matter for all products in the market, not specific to operating systems. You can make it easier with familiar UI, advertising and bundling your OS with hardware (although that may be anti-competitive practice it seems to be widely accepted where I live).
It's a matter of degree. To simplify, the costs of switching are linear in the complexity of using the product. I apologize that I don't know how to precisely model human network effects (you need to learn the product from someone) on top of it, but intuitively the societal costs are super-linear.
Computer systems are by far the most complex products human kind has ever produced. Given the simplistic model sketch above, the costs of switching in the computer industry are the highest humanity has ever seen, likely by orders of magnitude. Fun times.
Generally, high complexity of the implementation does not necessarily translate into high complexity of the interface.