This actually came as a surprise today. Microsoft buying Yahoo!? Preposterous!
That could change a lot about the web, but something smells. Microsoft is a huge company, and little-old Google seems to have them grabbing at straws to figure out how to catch up. I can look at any place on the web that Google produced and tell you exactly why their advertising makes so much sense. Why their e-mail works so well, and no user has to pay for it. Why they have so much available for free.
It's simply because they have but one reason: "Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." That's it. There are no software revenue projections, nothing to give the shareholders a hard-on, nothing about providing a service at a premium. Just to organize the world's information. This has been their goal since Sergey tried to download the Internet (or was it Larry? ...not important). Sure, they sell stuff. Useful stuff (except the lava lamp) even, like the Google search appliance and SketchUp Pro. But that is not their main business driver by any means. They're spending millions every year to scan books from libraries and make them searchable. They have a vast collection of scholarly journals and papers from around the world, and one may also search inside any of these.
This is just a taste of what Google is doing. They are successful because of something I don't have a name for, but it is something along the lines of know what you're doing and do no evil.
Most of you know that this blog is driven by the Blogger engine. I pay nothing for it, and it works much better than some of the other tools I've tried. Google probably bought it, but it has improved much over the years and it has never cost me anything. The funny thing is that there aren't ads all over it. Sure, there are ads on this site, but I put them there; they aren't some mandated advertisement justified for making my blogging free, it's just free.
No one has mentioned so far that Gmail doesn't inject ads into every message sent. It's just regular e-mail. The advertisements shown on the side of the Gmail window are only text-based, and they're usually relevant to what my e-mail is about. That way the advertising works. And if it works, people pay for it. So Google is king.
Microsoft and Yahoo! (and AOL, for that matter) are not because their interfaces are so heavy and the ads are very annoying. Their infrastructures are likely not as efficient as Google's (who else uses a hundred thousand servers?) and their business models are not in tune with what people want.
Okay, I changed my mind. Yahoo! and AOL are in the entertainment business. Microsoft is in the software business (I put that together all by myself!). Google, however, is in the search business. Does anyone remember when a Yahoo! search looked eerily familiar, as if the results of that search were the same as a Google search for the same string? It's because they were. Yahoo! used to use the Google engine for its search until just a few years ago.
The business of the web is changing, but there's no way I can predict anything. I only get feelings, and I'm usually wrong because business is definitely not one of my strong interests. If the major search engines are reduced to two, though, it could get pretty damn nasty by 2010. I'll likely not keep up with this subject, but it may be interesting nonetheless.
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