The problem is that Google just does it better. Here are 4 of Google´s biggest properties 1. Search (Free) - Does anyone remember the years before Google, where there were about 8 different search engines (lycos, webscrawler, excite etc), all with about the same market share.. You know, the days when you would search for ´investing news´... and 8 of the top 10 results would be about Brittany Spears? Google came to dominate Search because their results were substantially better than their competition. 2. Analytics (Free) - Have a website? add a line of code to the HTML and suddenly you get mountains and mountains of information about how people are using your website, who they are, what pages they are going to.. how long they are spending. Website owners can drastically make their website better and more relevant using this free service. No other service even comes close, not even ones that charge hundreds of dollars per month. 3. YouTube (Free) - Unlimited hosting of videos, a very easy to use system for updating and categorizing your videos and a huge audience. There are other services out there that offer all the same things, but none of them have anywhere near the eyeballs as Youtube does 4. Adwords/Adsense ( MONEY!) - How Google actually makes money. Again, similar to Search, they came to the market late, but with a vastly superior product. Their ability to place your ads on websites that are relevant to your product is amazing. If I sell vitamins, my ads aren´t going to show up on 1000´s of random webpages where I have to pay for useless views, instead my ads are going to show up on pages where people are reading or learning about health. As a person who plays both sides of Adwords/adsense... Google is at least 5x´s better than any of their competition. If you have a website that wants to make money.. If you don´t use Adsense and instead use a competitor, you just lost 80% of your money. If you use Adwords, and instead want to advertise your product around the web.. your ROI for buying ads through adwords will be drastically higher than any of it´s competitors just because of fraud prevention. The danger? they go all Microsoft.... and by that I mean they try to use their current dominant products to force us to use inferior other products of theirs. Nobody knows the future, but they have already let some of their services fail rather than strong arm us. Google Plus is a perfect example.. meant to be somewhat of a Facebook competitor... there were a lot of ways Google could have forced people to use G+ using their other services, but they didn´t. This is the opposite of what MSFT was doing back in the 1990s, and is exactly the reason Google chose ´don´t be evil´ as their motto ( a slap at MSFT).
