We saw this ten years ago with social media – people were bypassing corporate communications, marketing, and customer care to obtain information from each other.
I don’t think people were actually bypassing corporate communications — they were simply corporate communications of a different kind. Most so-called social media websites are nothing other than corporate blogs (and quite often the organizations that control these corporate blogs censor the content according to organizational rules [which are usually explicated in these organizations' "Terms of Service"])
Before that time, Google served a quite similar role / purpose / function.
In the meantime, Google has become increasingly involved in acquiring startup companies that might compete with its own business.
In the future, the organizational structure that will bring people together will increasingly be based in natural language information retrieval, and corporate branding and brand names will become ever less significant.
