Now that you've had a chance to read the arguments presented by Rich Skrenta in his post "Winner-Take-All: Google and the Third Age of Computing", I'm going to share one columnist's direct counterpoint.  Mitch Ratcliffe, writing for ZDNet, says that "Google's run is more than half done."  Written in response to Skrenta's argument, Ratcliffe thinks Google has, at most, one or two years of dominance left.

According to Skrenta's original post, IBM was the reigning king of computing from 1950 - 1980.  Microsoft took over in 1984 and ran the show until 1998.  With a little math, we can see that IBM's time at the top lasted 30 years while Microsoft was overthrown in only 14 years.  Applying a little deductive reasoning, Ratcliffe says that the ability to control the industry is dropping by 50% for each "age" of computing.  Therefore, Ratcliffe says, it can be concluded that Google's reign will only last about 7 years.

That would give Google one or two more  years in control.

Ratcliffe goes back to the year 600 in his analysis and says that each preceding era of information lasted about twice as long as the one that came after it.  If this is in fact a trend, he might be right about Google.  In addition, he goes on to say that as Google's dominance grows (and has grown), it becomes increasingly more expensive to acquire consumers for your product.

Ratcliffe concludes his counterpoint with a warning of sorts:  businesses are so busy trying to find ways to work with Google that they've failed to notice (or admit) that Google's dominance is short-lived.

Again, there's some truth to this argument as well.  It's next to impossible to be number one forever.  And although I wouldn't start Google's age of dominance as starting in 2001, I can't say for sure where on the continuum of time they fall.

What do you think?  Should we welcome the new king as Skrenta says… or help Google pack its bags?