In the current state of the web, nobody is going to beat Google at search. Google has been tweaked and squeezed for every last ounce of searchy-goodness over the past decade, and it shows by how they dominate the web. (With that said though, Bing rocks Google at both Image and Video search)
Google is so entrenched into the Internet and the minds of average users that it's going to take a paradigm change on the web to bring up a new level playing field.
It's the same way with Microsoft + the Operating System, Apple + the iPod, and so forth.
For any of these companies to get disturbed from their positions, the landscape and the playing field needs to change. This is best exemplified by how Sony used to dominate the portable music market until MP3 and digital music became possible and Apple eventually took over.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you view it), these broad technological jumps don't happen every year, so companies often stay in a position of domination until the whole game is changed in front of them.
The other thing is to judge your customer base properly. Once customer satisfaction is positive, it is a big hurdle to overcome. To supplant "Good enough", it appears that the new product has to be the 100-200% you stated.
Microsoft has had the same issue with its own upgrade (Windows XP), although that's a bit more debatable. I think it's a similar lesson though.
I've heard the same argument stated as 'must be 3x better' before, but it feels overly simplified. I think how much better you need to be depends on:
- How painful the status quo is for the market; do existing solutions have a perception of being 'good enough' or are folks screaming for something better? (People feel Google is good enough: a -ve for MS.)
- What are the switching costs? (Switching between search engines is relatively easy: a +ve for MS.)
Obviously, any pithy observation is by necessity overly simplified :) However, there's a lot more truth to it than otherwise. E.g, your first point, the painful status quo. My previous company addressed the job search market, in which most people are very unhappy with the status quo solutions; and our particular solution, I feel, was about 40-70% better than existing ones (and also a new paradigm), nonetheless, people weren't really readily jumping ship. With search engines (including a vertical one, like ours) evaluating comparative quality is actually pretty hard, which washes away a bit the easy switching cost (I don't mean expert comparisons; I mean average user looking at average queries).
Google is so entrenched into the Internet and the minds of average users that it's going to take a paradigm change on the web to bring up a new level playing field.
It's the same way with Microsoft + the Operating System, Apple + the iPod, and so forth.
For any of these companies to get disturbed from their positions, the landscape and the playing field needs to change. This is best exemplified by how Sony used to dominate the portable music market until MP3 and digital music became possible and Apple eventually took over.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you view it), these broad technological jumps don't happen every year, so companies often stay in a position of domination until the whole game is changed in front of them.