I was happy to see that other commenters where very little impressed with this article either, with the one above probably most to the point.
People don't see yet how instable these monopolies really are in the age of the internet. Once Google would really corrupt it's core product, search, someone could just go, download the clones of Googles software over at the apache foundation and upload it into a little EC2 cloud at Amazon. There is not even this network effect which allows Ebay to run successfully despite looking quite dated nowadays, because people feel they have to stick with them because eveybody else does.
Do you really think that the OSS world is on par with Google's army of (paid, full-time) engineers, and that EC2 is as efficient as (or, conceivably, even in the same ballpark as) Google's datacenter infrastructure? (Amazon's private infrastructure might be run as well, although they have very different concerns -- compare GFS (http://labs.google.com/papers/gfs.html) with Dynamo (http://s3.amazonaws.com/AllThingsDistributed/sosp/amazon-dyn...), for example.)
I don't know about that, mightn't inefficient datacenters cost more per query, leading to worse servers, leading to higher latency, which users care about?
Yes, users care about latency, but less efficiency doesn't necessarily lead to higher latency. (I have no idea what "worse servers" means.)
As long as Google can afford to provide decent anwers with acceptable latency, it will have users.
I think that efficiency is like programming effort, algorithms, and programming languages in that users don't care. They only care about results and the costs that affect them.
People don't see yet how instable these monopolies really are in the age of the internet. Once Google would really corrupt it's core product, search, someone could just go, download the clones of Googles software over at the apache foundation and upload it into a little EC2 cloud at Amazon. There is not even this network effect which allows Ebay to run successfully despite looking quite dated nowadays, because people feel they have to stick with them because eveybody else does.