>, if the market for cookies grew it at 6% every year, and thus the number of searches for cookies grew at 6% per year,
The author may have used poor examples to flesh out his thesis but I think his point is the contexts & triggers for advertisements can drastically change. When that happens, it can make newer companies become dominant.
For example, if Facebook-Apple comes out with an Oculus-or-wrist-wearable-augmented-reality-gadget, a user could be standing on a street corner and see a car pass by that he doesn't recognize. He then sends a voice command to his wearable to ask what the model is and it creates ads of dealers that sell it. The "search engine" behind the scenes could be Bing or whatever Facebook-Apple licenses.
The ads are still there. Searches (of some type) are still there. But the contextual triggers have changed. There are no business guarantees that google.com will remain in the pipeline of future (lucrative) ad triggers.
My example above may also be convoluted but I'm sure others could imagine a future where the majority of searches come from another mechanism besides typing words into a little box on a webpage. Ad rates from google would nosedive because advertisers would pay a premium for Oculus ads instead of google.com ads. I think those are the scenarios that would "eclipse" google.com.
This has happened before with newspapers. The car industry grew but newspapers ad rates for cars and car dealers have declined. A lot of those ad dollars shifted to television and google. Newspapers declined even though they still run ads for cars today.
But I think this is where the author misses the point. IBM and Microsoft are completely different business models. They just so happen to all leverage technology...one sells services and the other sells software. A more apt comparison would have been the shift from physical newspaper to online. I also don't see how native advertising is the "next wave". If anything (as you rightfully point out) things like VR and Siri might be the next wave, but these are still 5-10 yrs away in terms of maturity.
> My example above may also be convoluted but I'm sure others could imagine a future where the majority of searches come from another mechanism besides typing words into a little box on a webpage.
The author may have used poor examples to flesh out his thesis but I think his point is the contexts & triggers for advertisements can drastically change. When that happens, it can make newer companies become dominant.
For example, if Facebook-Apple comes out with an Oculus-or-wrist-wearable-augmented-reality-gadget, a user could be standing on a street corner and see a car pass by that he doesn't recognize. He then sends a voice command to his wearable to ask what the model is and it creates ads of dealers that sell it. The "search engine" behind the scenes could be Bing or whatever Facebook-Apple licenses.
The ads are still there. Searches (of some type) are still there. But the contextual triggers have changed. There are no business guarantees that google.com will remain in the pipeline of future (lucrative) ad triggers.
My example above may also be convoluted but I'm sure others could imagine a future where the majority of searches come from another mechanism besides typing words into a little box on a webpage. Ad rates from google would nosedive because advertisers would pay a premium for Oculus ads instead of google.com ads. I think those are the scenarios that would "eclipse" google.com.
This has happened before with newspapers. The car industry grew but newspapers ad rates for cars and car dealers have declined. A lot of those ad dollars shifted to television and google. Newspapers declined even though they still run ads for cars today.