@ I ain't Spartacus
" eventually their tech will be beaten by some other system that consumers are happy with. "
Better tech's all well and good, but the problem with competitiveness in a modern data-driven company is that the incumbents all have a backlog of data and an embedded userbase that no-one else does.
YouTube already knows what videos I like to watch, and can hook me for hours with recommendation after recommendation. Any new competitor wouldn't be able to trap me on their site for anywhere near the same amount of time.
Google augments its processing of my words with knowledge of my history, so search results are more relevant to me. No new competitor would be able to provide me with better results than Google, even if their tech was perfect, because they're lacking that data, and short-term convenience wins.
The article points out that Uber's big advantage is this same one -- they know people's habits and they know usage patterns, and new entrants start off on the back foot as they don't have any of that.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
