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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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.