I had a meeting with a couple of guys this morning, one is an entrepreneur who has an idea, the other is working with him as a consultant/business advisor. The entrepreneur has come up with an idea that is chucking the gauntlet down at the feet of a big internet player.  I can't go into detail as I have to respect his confidentially.

My gut feeling is that he's backing a horse that hasn't arrived at the track when the race is already half way finished.  It could be a very nice project but I don't know if I'm convinced enough to take his money and still be able to sleep at night.

The niggling voice in my mind remembers when Alta Vista had a larger market share as a percentage than Google have today and people said that they'd never get overtaken.  I can also remember developing a site as a personal project to allow people and estate agents to advertise property to rent or let.  It was called Homes From Home and it worked brilliantly. The problem was that there was a site called UK Property Gold that were ahead of me in the game and I thought they couldn't be beaten.  Along came Asserta who stole the market and had TV adverts and all sorts.  I slapped myself and thought that they would have the market forever.  Enter Rightmove.

The internet's short history is littered with the bodies of these outfits who may just have become complacent and then suffered for it.

The question in my mind is can the likes of Google, Ebay, Facebook, Twitter, etc, ever be reeled in and overtaken?

The problem nowadays is that people forget that most of these sites were started by one person working in their bedroom for nothing and it's taken years to get to the point where they are today.  Years of 1 man becoming 2, 2 becoming 4 and so on. These sites have evolved. How much manpower would you need to duplicate something like Ebay down to the last detail?  Not through evolution but by starting with a completely blank sheet of paper.  And then to be able to market it with sufficient force to get people to swap their loyalty from Ebay to Fbay.  Could it be done?  The internet might not be completely mature but it's certainly gone through puberty and the spots are starting to clear up as people habits become more entrenched.

Now even if you had a completely original idea that was a cast iron guarantee for success I'd think you'd struggle unless you had a massive budget. If your idea was that good then someone big, like Google, would pounce on the idea as soon as you went live and throw enough resources at it to sink you with something bigger and better than you could ever afford to.  Then they'd market it to the billions of people that use them every day and it would cost them nothing.

Maybe I'm being pessimistic about the whole thing.  Maybe I've seen so many crazy ideas that I can't see a good idea when it comes along. Whichever it is, I think this guy will go ahead with the idea and he has the energy to make a good fist of it, I think.