Today: Something from the know-it-all dept.
Meg Hourihan writes: I have no interest in switching to some new improved Yahoo or Microsoft search unless Google fails me.
Does anyone actually remember the good old days when everybody was using AltaVista? Their search enginge was working like a charm: It was fast (even with stone-age analog modems back then), it had tons of sites in its index and the search results were good.
Do you notice something? Right: Google basically has the same advantages than AltaVista had (and probably still has): They response in lightning speed, they have tons of sites in their index and the results are (mostly) pretty accurate.
So why did we leave AltaVista, if it didn't fail for us? Personally I don't remember it anymore, but it certainly was not because I missed something at AltaVista: I suppose I just switched to Google because virtually everyone I knew was already using it. And only then I noticed that, even though Google was similar to AltaVista in most points, they had a slightly bigger index (ok, actually they had indexed multi-million more sites) and I liked the clean layout of Google.com a bit more than AltaVista's frontend. (*) But AltaVista still worked for me and probably millions of other Google-switchers!
So what's the moral of this story? Never say that you will not switch from Google to Y! or anything else unless Google fails. History has proven that things may take a different direction.
(*) Does anyone remember if AltaVista has ever used banner ads?