What I've always found interesting is how there's never successfully been 'one' player on the internet who gives you everything as a one stop shop.
Once they get market share, unless they do something really crazy, you can't topple one of the market leaders. I mean who is ever going to topple -
- YoutubeGoogle for video sharing
- Flickr for picture sharing
- MSN for Instant Messaging
- Google for Search & Street View
- eBay for Auctions
- Twitter for Microblogging
- Amazon for Books
- Yahoo! for value-added web content like Yahoo! Questions, Yahoo! Groups etc.
- Facebook for social networking
etc.
Others might occasionally try to take a bite out of someone else (Bing Maps nipping Google Maps, for example), but unless one monster acquires the other in my opinion they're never going to get market share.