Google's SEC filing includes the following two paragraphs:
We face significant competition from Microsoft and Yahoo
We face formidable competition in every aspect of our business, and particularly from other companies that seek to connect people with information on the web and provide them with relevant advertising. Currently, we consider our primary competitors to be Microsoft and Yahoo. Microsoft has announced plans to develop a new web search technology that may make web search a more integrated part of the Windows operating system. We expect that Microsoft will increasingly use its financial and engineering resources to compete with us. Yahoo has become an increasingly significant competitor, having acquired Overture Services, which offers Internet advertising solutions that compete with our AdWords and AdSense programs, as well as the Inktomi, AltaVista and AllTheWeb search engines. Since June 2000, Yahoo has used, to varying degrees, our web search technology on its web site to provide web search services to its users. We have notified Yahoo of our election to terminate our agreement, effective July 2004. This agreement with Yahoo accounted for less than 3% of our net revenues for the year ended December 31, 2003 and less than 3% for the three months ended March 31, 2004.
Both Microsoft and Yahoo have more employees than we do (in Microsoft's case, currently more than 20 times as many). Microsoft also has significantly more cash resources than we do. Both of these companies also have longer operating histories and more established relationships with customers. They can use their experience and resources against us in a variety of competitive ways, including by making acquisitions, investing more aggressively in research and development and competing more aggressively for advertisers and web sites. Microsoft and Yahoo also may have a greater ability to attract and retain users than we do because they operate Internet portals with a broad range of products and services. If Microsoft or Yahoo are successful in providing similar or better web search results compared to ours or leverage their platforms to make their web search services easier to access than ours, we could experience a significant decline in user traffic. Any such decline in traffic could negatively affect our net revenues.
Comment: sounds pretty much like my Online cover story Google fights for top spot from October 30. This was the piece where Jim Pitkow of Moreover told me: "The only thing that Google really lacks is email." "Does that mean we can expect Page and Brin to launch an email service?", I asked. "It's a pretty good bet that they will," he replied, "because of the advertising potential. An email service is a great place to post ads: that's why email is still free."
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