A discussion about the software industry and their coders

Google has launched the Beta of its Finance News site which kind-of seems similar to Yahoo's but has some improvements on the personalization front. Greg Linden has posted some thoughts on how Google's site has improved personalization over Yahoo's.

In the area of Financial News Yahoo Finance is the leader on the web followed by MSN. Yahoo Finance drew 12m unique audience in Feb 06 according to an article on FT.com by Chris Nuttall.

For long I wondered how Google would truly differentiate itself from Yahoo instead of making it similar to the boxed-software world's feature wars of QuarkXPress V/s Adobe PageMaker or Adobe InDesign or MS Word V/s Corel WordPerfect. I wondered whether Google would eventually become a glorified copy of Yahoo and release similar online properties as Yahoo has or do something truly unique. I hoped that I would not have to see stuff that would go: "Google's new online Property X has 9 new features better than Property X from Yahoo. It also has 3 UI enhancements over the last release of Google X." I am therefore disappointed to hear about a me-too finance site release from Google -- a company that swears by the word "innovation." There already are finance sites from companies such as AOL, MSN, and CNN.

I closely scanned Google's Analyst day Presentation to understand the direction Google intends to take. I got three data points:

1) Slide 11, titled "2006 Strategic Priorities" Point 3 stated "Building new products and services for publishers of information." I connected this to projects such as Google Book Search.

2) PowerPoint Slide Notes to slide 12, titled "Lead in Search" stated "Add features, not properties and make it really easy to use." I connected the word "properties" in this sentence to Yahoo's properties like Finance, Sports, News etc.

3) PowerPoint Slide Notes to slide 23, with the "2006 Strategy" wheel stated the following 7 points:

1) Lead in Search: Deliver on Search fundamentals, and innovate new Search models
2) Provide a more complete Ads system: Wider and deeper (best user experience and best ROI)
3) Solve users’ needs and desires beyond Search: Create, Remember, & Share
4) Build the best hardware & software infrastructure: Leverage our lead in hw and sw to our increased advantage
5) Build the biggest footprint: extend Google services to users wherever they are
6) Scale to our huge opportunity: hire the best, leverage bottomup innovation, grow with core values intact
7) Establish thought leadership position in industry and beyond: work with extended partners, regulators, media and centers of influence

Nowhere, did I read Google Finance coming. John Battelle also expresses surprise "First, this marks a rolling shift at Google -- the company is getting into publishing, whether or not it wants to admit it." Clearly I am not the only person surprised and am now reluctantly getting ready to expect more me-toos from Google.

I expect the top visited sites at MSN, AOL and Yahoo to get duplicated by Google in the near future with 11 new features to mention in Press Releases. So much for Google's buzz over innovation and the premium paid by investors for it. Meanwhile, I will look out for some cool little start-up to show me real innovation and be bought over. :)