First, a few shocking statistics. Back in mid-2005 Google was barely ahead of closest competitor Yahoo by six percentage points at 36.5 percent search market share, as measured by comScore. Today that number has catapulted to a dominating 63 percent, while Yahoo remains second with 21 percent and Microsoft's MSN/Live have less than 10 percent market share. Also last year, Google posted record revenues of 21.7 billion and as of last week it's market capitalization sat at 96.4 billion, and that's considering its stock has tumbled to the $350s range from its record high of $714 a year and a half ago.
With those figures it's hard to argue that hip and playful Google is poised to become another in the list of large corporations, or at least be recognized as one soon enough, as pointed out by a recent article in the NY Times.
With both Yahoo and Microsoft troubled enough to take on Google in the short term, it'd seem that Google's excess of brand goodwill could take them even further in the coming year. In fact, some metrics different than comScore's are already putting Google ahead with over 70 percent of the search market. That begs the question, will you still love Google even if it's too big?