This is the "cathedral and bazaar" syndrom all over again in a different manner. Given enough eyeballs, s/w will leap into a platform of the users choice. Thereby 'locking' the user into an typical property. In this e.g it could be Google or FB etc.

nothing has really changed in terms of the monoply. The Way the game is played has just changed. In early days it was a lock down into the OS and now its a lock down on the Web Platform. Apps' will continue to morph and pseudo code its way around.. but the users has very limited choices!!

Google does not open-source anything it relies on, and their secrecy on important issues is legendary.

Wikipedia similarly doesn't give away its source of monopoly, which is its Google rank – if fact, they are extremely evasive and nasty about sharing even scraps of Google-juice (to be fair, they do have extensive link-spam problems).

Philip: "sort of democratic crowd wisdom; Google’s result rankings are powered by the specifics of how people around the world prefer to link to one another".

Not really. I don't know why people keep on repeating this old tale about Google primarily being based on link analysis. It was a nice tale about 10 years ago, and it is always useful for companies to have a cute story like that to tell the public. But it is not useful for making any conclusions about where things are going in 2009.

Link analysis is a very robust tool, and I think it's probably still very significant. Sure, Google considers hundreds of factors when evaluating web pages, but almost all of those will be weighted pretty low compared to link analysis.

Yep. Basically what you said in the last paragraph only with more smoke and more mirrors. Lots.

Web could not be excepted from capitalism.

I think about this from time to time too. What happens when one of the companies, god forbid, fails?

I literally am what I have. What happens when what I have is lost? Then who am I?