The competition you're referring to is an economical one that's based on the product. For any product which is a software application (whatever UI should it sp

The competition you're referring to is an economical one that's based on the product. For any product which is a software application (whatever UI should it sport, native, web based, remotely hosted, etc.), it's commercial success is tied to its features and UX. For something like Amazon or Google, it's not all that important if it's written in Lisp or BCPL or Prolog or whatnot, that's irrelevant in the competition among products. Lisp's competition is on a technical level with other programming languages, and it's target audience is programmers. It can only help allowing easier development of technology, more fluid continuity from idea to product, robust and helpful debugging tools. So writing a search engine in Lisp won't necessarily mean that you'll be one step ahead of Google in search business in terms of end product, you still need to come up with a better idea or better UX if you want to compete them, and other factors like advertising, conversion etc are in the play too. But with Lisp you may need less development resources to produce the product than you'd need with C++ or Java.