When Google or TradeMe dies.

I was chatting to someone the other day (Jim or Alf or Vivek or all of the above) about how Google or TradeMe or Microsoft will eventually have their day. There is a day coming that they will not be the biggest or best, and there is a day coming when they may not exist. It may not be in the next 5 years but the day will come.

Do you think it is possible to take on tradeMe or Google? SkrentaBlog offers 12 tips to taking on Google. Have a read, some of them are really applicable to taking on any huge company, product or service. Comapnies like TradeMe or Telecom or Manpower. Here are a couple of the highlights.

# 1, A conventional attack against Google's search product will fail. They are unassailable in their core domain. If you merely duplicate Google's search engine, you will have nothing. A copy of their product with your brand has no pull against the original product with their brand.

#2, Duplicating Google's engine is uninteresting anyway. The design and approach were begun a decade ago. You can do better now.

#3, You need both a great product and a strong new brand. Both are hard problems. The lack of either dooms the effort. "Strong new brand" specifically excludes "search.you.com". The branding and positioning are half the battle.

# 9 Your product must look different than Google in some way that is deliberately incompatible with their UI, for two reasons. One, if you look the same as them, consumers can't tell how you're different, and then you won't pull any users over. Two, if your results are shown in the same form as Google's, they will simply copy whatever innovations you introduce. You need to do something they can't copy, not because they're not technically capable of doing so, but because of the constraints of their legacy interface on Google.com.

# 10 Your core team will be 2-3 people, not 20. You cannot build something new and different with a big team. Big teams are only capable of duplicating existing technology. The sum of 20 sets of vision is mud.