[As ever, you can read this on the BBC News website]
Although it’s common to hear technology entrepreneurs and investors express concern about the possibility that Google will move into their market niche and take away their business, the reality is that neither Google nor anyone else is guaranteed success in a new area.
Google’s social network, Orkut, has not challenged MySpace or Facebook, online calendar services like 30boxes are still doing well despite Calendar, and the recently-launched voice and video add-on to Gmail is unlikely to supersede Skype as a business tool.
Last week Google announced the closure of Lively, the web-based virtual environment it launched in July, in order to ‘prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business’, as the announcement puts it.