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)."

Comments

ZDNet r0x0rz!

[smittyoneeach]

...like a one-string ukulele.

Google's US$2.5 billion war chest and freedom let employees throw many new services against the wall to see what sticks. But critics question whether Google has an efficient process for managing innovation. The free e-mail service Gmail, for example, is still in beta testing after nearly two years.
"It's like the Wild West at Google. They have enough money and enough disregard for the status quo," said one industry insider who asked to remain anonymous.

Google uses the word 'beta' as a fig-leaf, to manage user expectations.
Doesn't take a whole lot of brain cells to grasp that.
Then again, ZDNet publishes Dvorak, so go figure...

My Yahoo integration

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:personal projects not necessarily helpful

[Mr. Underbridge]

While there are great possibilities concerning those personal projects of google employees, it's still a risk. For many employees it could just turn into a wasted day. For others, it could turn into something that Google puts a lot of money into and ends up being a flop. Hopefully enough good (profitable) ideas come out of it but there's no guarantee.

That's why they call it R&D.

Re:personal projects not necessarily helpful

[dewboy]

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.

Who cares who's ahead of the game?

[Weaselmancer]

Choice is good.

Innovation.

[merdaccia]

"I do believe that Google will hit a wall eventually, and it will hit it spectacularly," said the book author Moore. "The real question is: What will it do then?"

I think Moore's missing the point. The reason a company hits a wall is that it stops being innovative, and instead tries to keep milking past success (ahem, SCO, cough). I don't recall Yahoo! making anything innovative recently, but correct me if I'm wrong. Google, on the other hand, is creating useful services left and right. It's already dominated search, and its webmail system is vastly popular and not even out of beta. Google Scholar needs some work, but Google news and Google maps are making good headway. Google isn't going to hit a wall as long as it keeps encouraging its innovative employees.

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.

Re:I wonder

[cybersaga]

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.

Brand Matters

[augustz]

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.

Re:I wonder

[qwijibo]

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.

Re:Hiring?

[NDPTAL85]

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.

Re:20% personal project?

[cybersaga]

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.

Innovation != Profitability

[JaF893]

Google might be a lot more innovative than Yahoo! But it's not like Yahoo! are going out of business.

Look at Microsoft - many here on /. say they aren't innovative but they still seem to making a tidy profit.

Re:Hiring?

[Eric Giguere]

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.

Eric
Google-related: my new book about AdSense for non-techies is now shipping

Re:personal projects not necessarily helpful

[Peter_Pork]

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.

PhD genius???

[javamann]

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.

Re:There is no comparison

[CdBee]

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)