A lot of folks, from investors to technology analysts, and CTOs like myself that have to gauge where things area headed - ask - will google exist in ten years?  Its a short and simple analysis.

First off - what keeps Google alive?  Stock hype - not anymore.  They are making money quarter to quarter - mostly off adsense and other web advertising.  They have made a market in monetizing web eyeballs.  If you have a web site, and want to make money off it, the quickest easiest thing to do is place google ad-words on it, and they pay you revenue for views and click thrus. 

They also make money off folks wanting to drive traffic to thier website, utilizing traffic driven from search and other google apps.

So they can persist, as long as folks continue to need those services and continue to go to Google for them.  In fact, thier cost structure is going down, and demand for these services is going up (See my entry "the google curves" which details this).

So displacement by someone else is largely the risk here.

And you have have read of recent folks coming up with "better search" , powered by "social response networks as well as algorithms".  Sounds great.  It could actually be better search.

But google will still be here, big as ever, in ten years.

Even if 5 times in the next ten years someone actually does come up with better search, better email, better calendar.

For many of the same reasons that Ebay and Amazon are still here.

Cause having a capability is one thing.  Being able to deploy it, re-deploy it, support it, and run it on a massive "millions of clicks" scale, is something else.  Nothing scales.

That is to say, you can't just take 1,000 servers running the same thing to serve 1000x more customers.  Their searches affect each other, etc.  You can't generate hundreds of (usable) megawatts stacking portable honda generators.  Massive generators are built differently.

So that little upstart with "a better search idea" has a lot to learn about massive web applications.  And customer support.  And first mover advantage.  And compelling me to learn a new place to go and re-type my contacts for gmail, etc.

But its the massive web scaling that keeps amazon amazoning, and ebay ebaying.  They know how to run massive applicaitons - and I have had dinner with technical folks from Ebay, and even over dinner its jaw dropping impressive how they do it.  And if you want to know why google is so secretive - its a hell of a trade secret.

Google has the mindshare already, first mover advantage.  Yahoo , Google, MSN, Ebay and amazon are here to stay.

I asked one of my top notch developers today which would be easier given $50million - improving Googles search to include social feedback, or deploying from scratch a new compute farm and search engine that can handle google sized traffic.  His answer was quick - improving Googles search algorithm.  Something google has done dozens of times already.  Oh you didn't know that?  Thats the beauty of web applications.  They keep chaning under thier veneer API of the screens you and I see.

If you don't think google can match someone elses search algorithm improvements far before an upstart can manage to run a massive server farm, just ask jeeves......

Google is a confluence of cash, genius of simple web applications, massive web application deployment infrastructure, a large number of smart people, and a market that can monetize web eyeballs.

Having a decent web application means you only have 1 of the 5 things google has, and the easiest one for them to match you on.

Which is why Ballmer is not sleeping nights. He has only 2 of the 5, perhaps  3 if you count MSN and hotmail as a mega scale web infrastructure.