At the end of The Bourne Identity, Jason Bourne is at the top of a staircase with a bad guy below who has the drop on him. His solution is to kick the corpse of another bad guy through the stair rail and ride it down, implausibly plugging the (living) bad guy as he falls. Google does the same thing quite frequently.
When they wanted to take out Microsoft Office, they encouraged many companies to develop online apps that looked like Microsoft Office, and then bought the best after Microsoft had snapped up several others that are now worthless iDung.
When they wanted to take out Microsoft Internet Explorer, they pumped money and developers into Mozilla Firefox, making it as corporate of a project as IE. Result? Many people use it, believing it to be a real alternative, while Google slowly slackens its support into the background.
Finally, Wikipedia: Google needed a way to provide some kind of standard result for any search query, because too many people were spamming. So they encouraged wikipedia, knowing that its content would eventually get out of hand.
Now, they’ve introduced Google Knol, which is a wikipedia clone — except that it’s hybridized with a group blog, and is only open to select contributors. Thinking of Associated Content or Reddit? Yeah, me too.
It’s a good way of acknowledging what Wikipedia tries desperately not to let the world know. Most wikipedia articles are written by relatively few people, maybe 2% of the contributing audience. They are augmented by another 10%-20% of the people there. The rest of the people on Wikipedia perform really obvious monkey tasks like plagiarizing websites that are expert in their area, so the Wikipedia page appears above them in search results. This was basically a giant web real estate grab.
With Knol, Google is starting where Wikipedia left off. Google has no problem admitting its elitism, and that it wants proven writers (probably power pro-bloggers) to write for knol. It doesn’t want the infighting that makes Wikipedia unreliable. It wants the hard content on technology, science, and social topics. That’s what’ll make it money.
Another smart strategy from Google, but maybe a bridge too far. I would further hybridize Knol with social networks to make sure that communities formed around any specialized type of knowledge, and they collectively produced it, including the makers of those original websites that Wikipedia plagiarizes. These are the people who really know what they’re doing and they deserve to have credit go to their websites, and then they will support the Knol concept.
This is all part of the web correcting itself. It became radically de-centralized, and then people saw that web pages were lost each time some guy who had the best web page on some topic had a personal crisis and let his blog registration lapse. So that knowledge, and more importantly, the way it is presented (knowledge ordering context) is moving up the chain toward centralized sites.
It’s not that much of a change from the past. Imagine if dmoz.org or dir.yahoo.com had archived sites into a standard template, instead of simply linking to them. That’s how far the web has come in 13 years :)