Muszkiewicz Reader

Important new businesses are usually some kind of hack. The established businesses think they understand the system and have setup rules to guard their profits and prevent real competition. New businesses must find a gap in the rules — something that the established powers either don’t see, or don’t perceive as important. That was certainly the case with Google: the existing search engines (which thought of themselves as portals) believed that search quality wasn’t very important (regular people can’t tell the difference), and that search wasn’t very valuable anyway, since it sends people away from your site. Google’s success came in large part from recognizing that others were wrong on both points.