The other day, I got accused of being a Trotskyist. If you’re not sure what that means, don’t feel bad; I had absolutely no idea myself.

The woman who used the T-word on me furnished this explanation: evidently, Trotsky claimed that the general populace doesn’t understand the levers that interconnect society and the economy.

I had just pointed out that a large portion of the people who want to stop global warming don’t realize how much their day-to-day lives would have to change. Don’t get me wrong—I want to stop global warming too. But I still drive a car, and go on overseas trips, and buy imported products, and I fully appreciate that all of those things are intricately linked to our fuel consumption.

Right now I’m about 80% through reading Wikinomics, a study of mass collaboration. The book is driving home for me how absolutely massive the uphill battle is for companies looking to unseat Google, or Amazon, or any other organization that has understood and leveraged the collaborative model.

In my most recent piece for Search Insider, I wrote about the powerful force of habit that keeps me using Google for search, and touched on the fact that a tweak in features is nowhere near enough to make me change search engines.

Essentially, I don’t have a lot of pain when it comes to search, and minor features improvements just aren’t enough to motivate me to switch.

The Trotskyism issue, though, is much bigger. Google is not just Google. Google is every other company, website, blog and mashup that has built a business model on the back of the search giant. All of these entities have a vested interest in Big G’s continued success.

Companies that have Google as competition can’t win just by being better at search; they would also have to convince an entire population of individually crafted satellite businesses to switch to a new model.

The Internet is an ecosystem. Companies looking to succeed in this space have to understand more than just the competition; they have to understand how all of the organizations surrounding them interrelate and interdepend.

Do you see other examples of web-based ecosystems around you? What are they? What do they mean for companies and competition? And what do you think of businesses built around this sort of model?

This entry was posted on Friday, October 19th, 2007 at 2:45 am and is filed under Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.