The competition between Google, Yahoo, and MSN has continued for a long time. In my opinion, however, Yahoo and MSN are not getting the idea behind Google since the beginning.

So far, they do not stand a chance in the competition. And they will not be able to catch up in a short time frame. The reason behind is: they are not focused on the real cash-cow and does not have the dynamic culture to keep up the changing environment and innovating applications.

Every now and then, there are observers, journalists, and analysists trying to predict what business Google is going to cut in. Like the bidding business, many of them believes Google will join the bidding marketing at some time, becoming eBay's major competitor. It turned out to be a false alarm.

Google's sole business is: online advertisement. It creates innovative applications, buys start-ups, implements existing applications with new thinking for domains other than search, that is dominant for now. It will continue to keep search its core technolog. Buy start-ups that dominant in new applications. And in-house implement applications in ways different than others.

That says, it is not Google's intent to follow its competitors and fight its competitors face-to-face. The "different ways" is the key to make its applications like elegant gadgets, and differs from its competitors. The better design it is, the better ground it gains. Existing applications from competitors can hardly change their shape due to the familiarity of their users.

And all these applications will not be its cash-cow. Its sole cash-cow is online advertising. Google is not creating/buying applications to make money. It does so to show its ad to more users.

Google is making money only from search and ad. And this is not going to change in a short time. Personally I think the search *business* is not going to grow real big because companies tend to have a certain way organize its data and the data access is often restricted in some way. For the enterprise search demand, I think the source code search will be more valuable.

To compete with Google, a company need to adjust the mind of its employees. Using a more creative and dynamic way. If a company wants to compete with Google, it has to develop a culture that engineers' opinion will be much respected, not the CEOs or managers. Most companies tend to have a schedule to follow and the engineers are forced to follow the schedule. In this way, engineers will not feedback their opinions at the first moment they have found a possible improvement, since they have a schedule to keep up.

If your schedule is to be changed at any moment because your project design is found to have some flaws, what would you do? What would Yahoo and MSN do? What will the marketing guys from these big companies do?

The above is totally my personal opinion. Any comments wlecome.