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Google vs. Yahoo: On a Collision Course
An anonymous reader writes "It's pretty clear from this analysis as to which company is ahead of the game. Take this simple comparison: at Google, engineers are expected to spend one day a week on a project of personal interest. This has resulted in new offerings like Google News and social networking site Orkut. At Yahoo, there are posters promoting the "Idea Factory", where employees are invited to well, submit ideas (read boring)."
Doesn't take a whole lot of brain cells to grasp that.
Then again, ZDNet publishes Dvorak, so go figure...
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Yahoo has been around for a long time. I used them as far back as 95ish. I can't remember when my.yahoo.com came along but I have been a long time user since. However, anyone remember the Denial of Service attacks back in ~2001(?), since then I have been using google, msn, jeeves, in fact all search engines as I was so ingrained into yahoo that I couldn't even search using other engines. But really, the search aspect is such a low priority now that I don't care what engine I use; the real draw of yahoo is the integration of my.yahoo. Google has just now started getting that integration but yahoo has done this for years. I don't think that google will be able to overcome that time/gap that yahoo had in creating it's service. In the long run I believe yahoo will win out.
What happened to google being a search engine? Thats all I have and will ever use it for...... As for yahoo, forget it! I like the clean lines of google.
That's why they call it R&D.
The risk is definitely there, but what you get from letting your employees go on seredipitous excursions once a week is potentially more valuable than profitable ideas: you get very happy employees. Google already has a rep for hiring only the best and brightest -- seems like they have a good way of holding on to them, as well.
Choice is good.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Google is like the annoying smart kid that sits in the first row of class. Yahoo's in that class too, watching the smart kid get all the glory, and it can do nothing about it. It's time for Yahoo to either change classrooms or start studying.
*blinking cursor*
It's pretty clear, from this post, which side the poster is on. Take this simple comparison: At the site named Google, you are expected to search and find whatever you want. But at "Slashdot", readers are invited to, well, submit stories (read boring).
Really.
Google is probably headed that way
If Google was headed that way, they would have been there by now. They are huge. They are "standard".
The "20% your time" vs. "submit ideas" is the key. Management rarely sees potential where there is potential. How many times in history have great ideas been turned down because a manager says, "Oh that'll never work"?
At Google, by the time something becomes an official project, they already know it works.
When there's no guessing game, you can't be wrong.
Web Design Tips
What Yahoo still seems to be missing is that brand really matters. And brand is related to trust and doing the right thing by customers.
Take their Yahoo! music engine for example. A nice piece of software. But I, along with many I'd hope, are tired of downloading software to find it installs lots of other largely bugus but "required" junk. This is exactly the adware phenomenon that drives people nuts.
Of course, the Yahoo Music engine REQUIRES yahoo messenger to play music as a dependency (and no doubt will add more "requirements" in the future to increase revenue). Obviously, they saw a chance to push garbage that people wouldn't otherwise download.
In the end, this reflects on your brand. Either you are the company that respects my communication preferences, or you "update" them, and set them all to send me spam, and claim it is in enhancement (Yahoo).
Either you provide me with a cool music engine, or you "enhance" it with unrelated downloads.
Bottom line, many of us don't have the time or interest to sort out if we are going to get screwed over. The $6/month for the music engine is irrelevant actually for me, that is free. But the trust / hassle, and just being able to get what I want without tons of junk, that matters a lot.
If my mother, who is not as quickly able to uninstall stuff, downloads music engine, and then has messenger sitting forever in her taskbar, that sucks. Thankfully, I can tell her to download itunes, and she will have a clean and good experience. Neither she nor the queen of england want to be bothered with Yahoo! Messenger crap.
Pretty soon, folks like my mom, and myself, will trust Apple / Google, and when they release stuff, be happy to try it on the premise we are less likely to be screwed. Yahoo has a history in the other direction.
So I don't begrude Yahoo it's right to bundle a nice music engine with whatever other stuff it wants to load it with. I just don't
understand it. In the end, the company that develops products to deliver junk as its goal will fail to a company that developes a product that delivers what people want. I mean, are you putting
together a music service or not? If so, focus on the damn music part.
Long term I think this brand power will really matter, and Yahoo's history relative to Google put google in a good spot.
I like Google. I'd love to work at Google.
That said, I find that the "personal projects" aspect of Google is one of the more sinister. Remember that Google can take your personal project if they want it. So it's not really a personal project, it's funded independent R&D.
It's part of the way Google tries to stay agile. By insinuating ownership over projects that their corporate culture couldn't create, they can come up with things that another company their size couldn't, and do it cheaper (remember, Google employees are salaried, and likely you're going to work on the project in your spare time as well).
Add to that the rumblings we've been hearing about how Google "strongly encourages" employees to have such a project, and you paint Google's practice in a less favorable light.
I'm not saying the practice is wrong, but let's not forget that it's just another way to diversify their investment in an engineer. I think it's extremely clever and most engineers would find it pleasant, but I know I couldn't work on many of my projects because I wouldn't want Google to co-opt them.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
Every business wants to make lots of money. There's nothing wrong with making money providing services people want. The factor that makes people like google is that they do still provide services people want, not just find new ways to scam people out of more money.
Wow you don't know anything about how Google works. The skunk works time that is set aside is by design. Its not a "perk". Its how they stay ahead of the game inovatively. They only hire really really smart people (PhD's) to begin with. So basically everyone there IS a genius. Also the creators of skunk work projects are allocated extra shares of Google to reward them for their creativity.
Its not in any way something "allowed" to mollify the masses.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
This is why you have to go through about 15 interviews to get hired by Google.
I doubt AT&T was that strict about who they brought on board.
With a bunch of Joe Normals as employees, of course the 20% rule will fail.
Web Design Tips
Google might be a lot more innovative than Yahoo! But it's not like Yahoo! are going out of business.
/. say they aren't innovative but they still seem to making a tidy profit.
Look at Microsoft - many here on
There's always a tug-of-war happening in tech companies with respect to innovation. It seems to me that the best companies have people that take a long-term view, looking ahead at what's coming down the pipe, instead of the short-term quarter-by-quarter view. This can be hard in a public company, yes, and it's a difficult balance to achieve.
That said, I don't think everyone likes skunk works projects. The important thing is that people enjoy what they do, whatever it is. A good QA person, for example, is one who derives satisfaction from finding and squashing bugs and ultimately making things better for the customer. Different strokes for different folks. A company like Google will tend to attract the creative I-gotta-think-about-things types because that's what they want. But it doesn't meant that every company has to work that way. Indeed, I doubt every company could work that way.
And don't forget the customer satisfaction angle. I suspect that what really turns the crank of people at Google is that they can come up with projects that will eventually be used by thousands, potentially millions, of people worldwide. They're thinking like customers, and in fact they are customers themselves... and Google's audience is so large in general that I suspect it means that there will always be a group of customers who can identify and enjoy a given skunk works project. And then the audience gets bigger... it's a bit self-perpetuating.
EricGoogle-related: my new book about AdSense for non-techies is now shipping
There are people with different personality types and different feelings about their work. Google is hoping that the kind of people they attract are the kind who will do something interesting that might help the company. AT&T strikes me as the kind of place where that policy would have an almost exactly 20% drop in productivity. A lot of large companies have a lot of people who will do the bare minimum to not get fired.
Google is betting on having a significant number of the other type of person. If they're wrong, they still have a bunch of employees who are given more freedom to pursue their own interests than most employees.
What else would you use to promote innovation? Posters in the restroom? Inspirational speeches by top management? Innovation is about allowing your employees to have lots of ideas, trying them out, and be open to take the few that really work, making billions out of them. Sure, this process can be terribly inefficient and expensive if poorly managed, but Google is probably smarter than that. Also, innovation is about smart, creative people having time to think and having little fear to be wrong. When you give the opportunity to innovate to the top talent Google hires, you cannot help but go well beyond your competitors. Guaranteed.
I'm not saying they will not screw up the business side, and go under. I'm saying that, in the technical side, their setup is just perfect. I cannot think of a better way of building an innovation juggernaut.
So, you are saying that most, if not all, of the PhD's are geniuses? From what I have seen after 27 years in high tech is that a PhD is someone who avoided work until there were no more degrees to get. Never confuse a degree with intelligence.
....in that they will eventually both be eclipsed by a newly emerging company at some point down the road which has a better proprietary search algorithm with a better plan to capitalize on it.
Alternately: Google and/or Yahoo are eclipsed by an established company that has no search algorithm whatever, but does have a better (read: uber-predatory) takeover plan.
Google in particular may prove vulnerable, if it really truly lives by the code of "Do No Evil" -- a company not willing to do Evil may itself be a prime target for Evil machinations.
Then again, I don't think the Do No Evil ethos will last forever at Google -- Evil is simply too fucking profitable.
All of the above is speculative, I am not an economist.
-kgj
-kgj
They aren't a portal - Yahoo is a portal - a huge, sprawling mess with a search box lost somewhere on it.
Google is a search company - a clean, sparse search engine homepage with some (~10) links to other projects they own - a very different design philosophy.
Yahoo is a "media" company - they lost sight of search a long time ago, and have only recently started actively pushing it again (how long were they syndicating Google - or others' - results for?). This loss of emphasis on what made them big is what made them lose relevance as a search engine, but what gained them relevance for the unwashed masses (who lap up astrology, dating services, etc, etc, etc).
Google is, first and foremost, a search company (well, ok, an advertising company, but one that understands it can only survive by focusing on "search"). They may also produce or acquire innovations in other areas, but these are generally either subsets of "Search" (News, Local, Adwords/sense, etc) or fit well within the same conceptual framework (ie, large datasets they can mine - Orkut, GMail, etc).
True, Google does now offer a portal homepage, but that's very different to "being a portal" IMO...
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
Yahoo buys companies so that 1) they can at least move in the direction of an AOL-styled walled-garden area, 2) so they can overall have more page-views and thus have more advertising space, and 3) so they can "synergize" between the offerings to advertise between them and generally present a unified web presence.
Google buys companies and develops new projects because 1) they have money to invest and want to grow it generally, 2) they have more skill in innovation and technology generally, and so they can grow many different ideas without tying them all together, simply because they're better at individual projects, 3) they have experience with and an already-in-place infrastructure for cluster computing, and this allows them to start up new ideas faster than equally-innovative competitors, and 4) because Google was profoundly helpful from a technical perspective in the search arena, and this made them a household name. But new frontiers are coming, and Google is one of the few largish companies who have the chance to retain a culture to take advantage of the Next Big Thing.
Google doesn't NEED more page-views for advertising... they already have Google AdWords where other people bring their page-views to google. Google is more free to develop or turn down new ideas based on their technical merit, in the hopes that they will stay on top of the next big ideas, some ways down the road. During their IPO, Google explicitely said they're trying to take the long view. In contrast, Yahoo MUST develop new ideas NOW in order to simply keep growing.
Try this.
http://search.yahoo.com/
To re-frame this into the overused /. mold...
Step 1: snatch up a myriad of the brightest minds around
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit!!!
Step1 isn't even the most important step here. * First off, there are those who assert that just about everyone is capable of working at "nearly brilliant" levels (I added the "nearly.") of creativity, given the right environment, it's just that most people have been trained by society not to be creative. I'm hesitant to buy in too fully, but I will say that merely good contributors could work wonders in the proper environment.
Second, given the wrong environment, the brightest mindes are likely to be even more discontent than average contributors.
Finally, probably the most important factor is that the founders are still at the helm. Usually the founders know what they want, have a vision of how to get there, and have the karma to make the organization march to their plan. That's hard to match once new people take over, and a business quits being a personal vision, and becomes just a business.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Yes, but a company can make a tonne of money and still not be evil. They two things are not mutually exclusive.
I realise much of the successful companies out there are in fact, evil, but it's not a necessity.
It's capitalism. The reason you don't hear about the decent companies that make lots of money is because good people don't make the news. Journalists are more interested in the company that dumps sludge in the local water supply, or integrates their inferior browser with their monopolised product.
When decency becomes something media-worthy, you might realise there's a lot more companies out there that aren't evil.
Until then, all of the news will be about Microsoft, Enron, SCO, and outsourcing to China.
Gmail may not be "all that" to you but for many people - myself included - the combination of a 2.3Gb inbox and POP3 access is revolutionary. I used to use Yahoo! mail - I stopped when they started spamming me on a regular basis then stated I had to pay for POP access - a practice they continue, (as do Hotmail now as well despite using a non-standards compliant system) - to this day.
In a race between free and pay-for-spam, free's going to win every time. If only Gmail had IMAP, (I'd pay for that too)
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
If it is worth working. Every time I talk to an agent jobhunting for them he is trying to offer me a 20% salary cut. To add insult to injury they also have the nerve to ask if your current salary is "negotiable". I have started answering "Yes, if you would like to negotiate it in the right direction, in other words - UP".
No thanks. They may have a few really smart people like Delany on their staff, but with this rate of pay I somehow doubt that they are going to get anywhere near getting and retaining talent in general
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Take this simple comparison: at Google, engineers are expected to spend one day a week on a project of personal interest. This has resulted in new offerings like Google News and social networking site Orkut. At Yahoo, there are posters promoting the "Idea Factory", where employees are invited to well, submit ideas (read boring)."
So Google is ahead as far as technical innovation goes, by some measures. Some here seem to think that that would be enough to ensure success on other fronts, profit and size being the main ones. Can we say "Microsoft" people?
While I think that Google and Yahoo can co-exist if they differentiat their offerings, the "winner" in this battle will be determined by marketing, not technical innovation. The average Joe User will not use Google's latest tool if it is not simple, and/or if the word does not get to Joe User.
W9x:Thanks for the make-work project Bill.
Gmail is not that original. Hotmail had web based mail years before Google. Yea the gave you a bunch of storage and a very good interface but they did not invent web mail. [...] Google news is okay but I see very little that is better than my.yahoo.com. Gee a news site? Again not all that original.
I think an unofficial Google manifesto could be to do things that have already been done, but 'better'.
Whether they actually succeed or not is left as an exercise for the reader, but you have to admit that search engines are no longer ad-riddled, ultra-busy 'portals' since Google came along, and webmail services are no longer providing pitifully small amounts of storage space...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
how much profit has gmail brought in for them?
...For the beast had been reborn with its strength renewed, and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror.
Or, you could look at it from a comparables perspective and realize that Google is a one-trick pony (98% of revenue from advertising) compared to the diversified revenue streams at MSFT or YHOO.
Using your numbers
GOOG: 285.89 / 2.53 = 113
YHOO PE=57
gives an expected per share value of $144.21 for Google. So Google is, as you say, selling at twice it's expected value.
Analysts expecting great things from Google? Or irrational exuberance with Google in it's own private dotcom bubble? There are a lot of smart people at Google - I know several of them personally - but there is no way in H-E-double-hockeysticks that they are worth $286 per share.
The first time they miss their numbers, they're going to bust - the momentum investors are going to run home to momma, and there will be a lot of small time players, and recently hired Google employees, getting screwed when their stock tanks.
It's not a question of if, it's a question of when...
In the past year or so I've had potential interest in several Yahoo Groups. However, I'm really put off by the need to create a full-blown Yahoo account just to contribute to them. What if I don't want another G-D email address that I'll never use? Let me create a user-id/password pair, and NOTHING MORE. Just because I want to post to a group doesn't mean I want to create a significant relationship with the hosting service.
I've also run into contests that you can only enter through a Yahoo account. Stupid advertisers, trying to draw interest in their product and creating an obstacle for the customer at the same time.
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
At Yahoo they're lightyears ahead. I never understood much of the adversity of Slashdot readers against Yahoo. Maybe it would appeal more to them if you explain that the influence alone of Yahoo on the field of usability is much more than Google can ever gain for. During the "killer website" times they alone with Jacob Nielsen stood out; two years on and all portals went back to usability over form.
From a financial point of view, they already went over the one-horse strategy period Google is still in and have diversity of income.
From a "do no evil" point of view, I fail to see why Google is not exactly like Microsoft: they never innovate, but copy or buy the innovators. Have they ever invented something themselves? I wonder why that makes Google cool, while others would be just called boring copycats.
Also, I distrust a company which only hires in a "inbreed" way and only takes on clones of the people already present. They must be so happy with themselves, it makes you wanna puke. More importantly though, this is a recipe for slow detoration of creativity, yah-sayers and slow death in general by dismissing everything conflicting minds can reach, which actually does more than the clone-hormany model.
Next, yo got to wonder if they and all their watchers still know where their head is and where their ass is, because they seem to me mixing them up: for all the effort put into the new services, everyone except a minority of nerds actually cares. Do you think my friendly neighboor,a lovely cake baking woman in her fourties, does anything else with Google then type in a searchword every now and then? Still, she represents the masses where the money comes from. But Google seems only occupied with adding new services and have fallen for the same mistake that made them big. Their preoccupation makes them beatable.
What also makes them very beatable is they have overpaid employees where 20% of the time is mostly thrown away. Since nor the brain or the education of your Indian programmer is inferior, someone could hire tripple the staff and improve on them.
Looking at the stock, this is what I call: cash time.
Oh no! Yahoo bought something? Are you serious?! Well, long live Google then, because they invent everything in house, don't they?
I have also talked to friends who were less successful at escaping the real world than me, and they have found that they get a very good response rate from Google ads.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Even Google isn't worth commuting to Mountain View from the East Bay. I did that for two months a while back (not for Google, but for another tech company in MV) and vowed to never do it again. My time and stress levels are more important to me.
If the job isn't in the East Bay or San Francisco, I'm not interested (I'm working in SF currently). My SO is currently commuting to Palo Alto for the summer and she recently decided the same thing.
I like my women like my coffee... pale and bitter.
I generally don't use the word "evil" unless I'm talking about religion or fairy tales. A company can't really be "evil". You could instead say something specific about their business practices, instead of a childish word like "evil"
I don't respond to AC's.
The yahoo inside is a lot more hacker friendly than most people imagine. There are TONS of code in yahoo CVS that if released outside would bring yahoo down !. Stuff like a launchcast music player written in perl or a Y! messenger in Qt. Most of us are encouraged to do this (by our own engg managers) - which is a good thing because I personally waste more than 20% of my time playing pool.
... Idea factory is for people who have ideas and no time to implement i.e business managers.
I have a very good off-time project, which is picked by me