What always surprised me about Microsoft was the amount of well-intentioned cluelessness that went on. People in large corporations tend to get isolated from customers and become quite bureaucratic and territorial. That often leads them to doing stupid things that have a negative impact on the company’s public image. Starting a company in a dorm room doesn’t protect you from being collectively stupid when your company gets big. In fact, it may make you more prone to it.

I always compare Google to Microsoft. They’re cruel, tend to be monopolists but still are the No1 in the game.

I don’t think online advertising would go into decline unless Google became considerably more heavy handed. I do think there is a danger of them doing this, as I indicated in the article. If they do, it might lead to a slight decline in online advertising revenue before regulatory agencies deal with their activities. I’d rather this worst-case-scenario not happen though since it wouldn’t be good for anyone.

I wrote my whole analysis of this issue here:
http://www.untwistedvortex.com/2007/11/21/a-dispassionate-analysis-of-the-whole-google-vs-bloggers-scenario/

I think the whole business of online advertising is now in the phase of decline as per the law of diminishing returns, because the field has been saturated with advertisers and publishers a long time ago and google are feeling the pinch themselves.

They are using their might in the search field to bulldoze their competitors in the advertising field.

The thing is that Google will force link selling underground where there won’t be disclosure of paid vs. unpaid links. They may end up wishing they hadn’t gone after such activity. After all, it would be easy enough to algorithmically figure out which links to discount. Soon it won’t be.

Alex