Mac has a much more significant market share than it did then, there are several viable alternatives to MS Office, and iOS and Android have kept Windows from having any significant market share in mobile.
That last point is the most significant here: sure, you might not be able to beat Google at Google-like search, but you can try to start building the thing that will become more important than Google-like search in the next 5-10 years.
Mac has increased in market share yes, but it's still not even close to a threat.
MS Office is, like Windows, still the king of office productivity application suites. Yes, there are competitors, but they are not a threat to MS as far as I know.
I'm not entirely sure that mobile will be replacing desktop in the near future. People have been shouting "fire!" for years now when it comes to tablets vs. desktop. Regardless, the original comment was talking specifically about desktop.
> Regardless, the original comment was talking specifically about desktop.
Yes but that's the point. Microsoft may still be the most dominant player on the desktop, but they're no longer the most important company in tech, because the desktop is no longer the only important platform.
Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple are all now as important or more important than Microsoft, because they all run platforms that are as important or more important than Windows.
It was hard to imagine that ever happening in 1999, yet it had started happening, and it became clearly apparent that it was happening within just a few years.
Similarly, whilst Google might seem hopelessly dominant now due to their dominance in search, their dominance over tech will subside when the next important new platform emerges.
I think the OP was talking specifically about search, not tech in general. It's rather obvious that unless companies constantly reinvent themselves that the new tech will replace old methods. His question was directed toward the possibility of someone coming in and taking over search as it is today. Which i'm curious of other opinion on this question as well, because frankly I think unless a radical innovation happens in the field, that modern day search is going to be forever relegated to google.
> I think the OP was talking specifically about search, not tech in general.
Yeah fair enough, so they were.
> It's rather obvious that unless companies constantly reinvent themselves that the new tech will replace old methods.
It's obvious in theory/hindsight, but not so much in the real world, as it's impossible to predict exactly what the next important thing will look like - which is why it's pretty much always a new upstart that invents it rather than an incumbent.
> His question was directed toward the possibility of someone coming in and taking over search as it is today. Which i'm curious of other opinion on this question as well, because frankly I think unless a radical innovation happens in the field, that modern day search is going to be forever relegated to google.
Well, for what it's worth, and if it isn't already clear from my previous comments, I'm pretty sure Google will always dominate search-as-we-know-it, but that's not that big a deal, because search-as-we-know-it won't always be as important as it is now.
just because windows remains the king of desktop, it doesnt mean that change hasn't affected them... in this case, the desktop is becoming less and less relavent. it is new platforms that are rendering windows less important. android, ios, alexa, google home - computing is moving away from the desktop.
similarly, google's near-monopoly in search, is not really threatened by other pure-play search engines, but rather out of left field: facebook and amazon. google may very well be the dominant search engine in a decade or two, but search may not matter as much as it did in the last decade because other platforms rise in prominence.
Very rarely ever directly though. When Google became the number 1 search engine nobody else actually wanted to be the number 1 search engine - they wanted to be the "home page of the web".
-Us, 1999
One thing I've observed in tech over the past 25 years is that change comes from unexpected places and often very quickly.