Due to the Thanksgiving holiday, I've spent the past day and a half with a large variety of young people whose ages range from 11 to 22 years old. The various conversations I've participated in and overheard have cemented some thoughts I've had about competition in the consumer software game.

This series of thoughts started with a conversation I had with someone who works on MSN Windows Live Search. We talked about the current focus we have on 'relevance' when it comes to our search engine. I agree that it's great to have goals around providing users with more relevant results but I think this is just a one [small] part of the problem. Google rose to prominence by providing a much better search experience than anyone else around. I think it's possible to build a search engine that is as good as Google's. I also think its possible to build one that is a little better than they are at providing relevant search results. However I strongly doubt that we'll see a search engine much better than Google's in the near future. I think that in the near future, what we'll see is the equivalent of Coke vs. Pepsi. Eventually, will we see the equivalents the Pepsi Challenge with regards to Web search engines? Supposedly, the Pepsi challenge shows that people prefer Pepsi to Coke in a blind taste test. However the fact is Coca Cola is the world's #1 soft drink, not Pepsi. A lot of this is due to Coke's branding and pervasive high quality advertising, not the taste of their soft drink. 

Google's search engine brand has gotten to the point where it is synonymous with Web search in many markets. With Google, I've seen a 7-year old girl who was told she was being taken to the zoo by her parents, rush to the PC to 'Google' the zoo to find out what animals she'd see that day. That's how pervasive the brand is.It's like the iPod and portable MP3 players. People ask for iPods for Xmas not MP3 players. When I get my next portable MP3 player, I'll likely just get a video iPod without even bothering to research the competition. Portable audio used to be synonymous with the Sony Walkman until the game changed and they got left behind. Now that portable audio is synonymous with MP3 players, it's the Apple iPod. I don't see them being knocked off their perch anytime soon unless another game changing transition occurs.

So what does this mean for search engine competition and Google? Well, I think increasing a search engine's relevance to become competitive with Google's is a good goal but it is a route that seems guaranteed to make you the Pepsi to their Coke or the Burger King to their McDonalds. What you really need is to change the rules of the game, the way the Apple iPod did.

The same thing applies to stuff I work on in my day job. Watching an 11-year old spend hours on  MySpace and listening to college sorority girls talk about how much they use The Facebook, I realize we aren't just competing with other software tools and trying to build more features. We are competing with cultural phenomena. The MSN Windows Live Messenger folks have been telling me this about their competition with AOL Instant Messenger in the U.S. market and I'm beginning to see where they are coming from.