Martin40 - 5:38 pm on Feb 20, 2007 (gmt 0)

You don't need the "best" product to win - you need the "Impression" of the best product.

Coolio. It's only half true, but the "impression" is done so badly in general, that it seems totally true.

New auction sites appear monthly, all claiming to be better than ebay; very one I've seen is cr*p.

Well....what I think I'm seeing is local auction sites replacing ebay.

So masses of money + appealing even more to human laziness and a way to channel traffic. I can only see Microsoft being able to do that.

Microsoft is solid and will get there some time (but when?). There are thousands of business groups that have the means to start a search engine. Easiest would be to buy search results from Google and with original marketing they would be able to get in. But these days originality is the bottleneck.

Google fast, uncluttered. People want results yesterday, they don't give a damn about beauty design.

Oh, they do, but not at the expense of usability.