Marketing_Guy - 11:24 am on Jul 29, 2011 (gmt 0)

There is no viable competition for Google - just a bunch of people trying to play catch up. Only really the unexpected rise of innovations like FB, Twitter, SU, smartphone apps, etc have really challenged Google in any way and they really only focus on their own markets. Realistically businesses need to systematically target Google services and either vastly improve on them or render them obsolete with innovations in order to even have a chance of toppling the giant.

It's unlikely that an single organisation could do that, but there's no reason an independent couldn't come along and, for example, take on the Adsense market (let's face it, Adsense sucks for publishers - it could be done a lot better).