Herd effect: Search engine dark rule 4

"Herd effect" refers to a common phenomenon in the management of market behaviors of some enterprises. For example, a herd (group) is a very scattered organization. In normal times, everyone is blindly left and right together. If a sheep finds a fertile green grass and eats fresh grass there, then the flock will rush to snatch the grass there, regardless of the wolf next to it, or you can't see any other better grass.

The appearance of the herd effect is generally in an extremely competitive industry, and a leader (leader) in this industry occupies the main attention, then the whole herd will continue to copy the movements of the leader, where the leader went to eat grass, and where other sheep went for gold.
When competition in the search engine market increases, the search engine giants pay close attention to the movements between competitors. Once a search engine has a new function, or in a new field, a large number of search engines will try to see if the new "water Land" is really fat and profitable.
In the search engine industry, Google has established a leader position since 2002, so every move of this goat has become a copy of the specimen:
1]
2003 Google acquired blogger.com and entered the blog market
MSN Space was released at the end of 2004 to enter the blog market
Yahoo 2005 released Yahoo 360
2]
Google acquires Picasa
Yahoo acquires flickr
3]
Yahoo has Map
Google releases Map service
4]
Almost simultaneously Yahoo launches video search
Google immediately released video search
5]
2004 Google Elastic Search
2004 Msn Elastic Search
2005 Baidu Elastic Search
2005 Yahoo distributed search
6]
Gmail provides 1 GB space
Yahoo resize
Expanded Msn to 250 M
7]
Google's adwords make money
Now it has become a standard model
Such an example can be used as an example. For example, if the API is open, is the herd effect good or bad?
Positive: The herd effect is a Strategy to reduce R & D and market research. It is now widely used in various industries and is also called "Copy Strategy )". When a company places its products on the market through research and development, it will be easily copied by its competitors, eliminating the costs of preliminary R & D, which is one of the sources of increased competition.
Reverse: The herd effect is more about blind projects and vague prospects caused by insufficient market research, and even disperses the company's energy. The so-called, there is no free lunch, grasp the advantages and disadvantages of the herd effect to make a correct decision, choose a fertile grass.
Let's predict several "inevitable" events in the future with the herd effect:
1] Google will enter the Personal Portal)