Bing may be marginally better than Google. It's certainly possible that it is.

But marginally better doesn't matter much, which is why I was careful to say "notably" better.

Search now is nothing like what it will be in a decade, and someone is going to make that leap. Might be Google, might not.

What happens when someone makes that quantum leap in delivering the information you want?

If it's not Google, the ad network disintegrates at least as fast as the search users vanish.

I would argue that Youtube has the most lock-in of any Google product, with Gmail second. Neither is invulnerable, but Youtube in particular will be hard to pull folks away from. Moving video around is tedious, and people largely just won't do it.

I was working at Google when this Bing campaign went live. People didn't believe this, so they spent some money on Mechanial Turk, so that people do the "Bing challenge" and report results. I recommend doing that, if you have some disposable money.

I'd say, though, that the ads network is the bigger lock-in for Google, because it's vastly superior than alternativea.

> Facebook has TREMENDOUS lock-in. For any new place to have value, it's got to have the majority of the people Facebook has > Facebook's value IS lock-in

How can a website lock you in to only being able to share things with your friends through their website? Do they lock you out of your friendships if you quit the site? This is a very bizarre notion to me. Facebook accounts have no value, the people behind the accounts and the relationships have the value. Facebook disappearing wouldn't prevent you from communicating with them. Is this real life?

> and companies with real technical prowess will fail because they rely on producing something new

Err, what? Do you mean that smart people working on hard problems are destined to fail? That facebook has some how consumed all of the available users and prevented them from existing any where else on the internet?