The Biz of Coding

Strengths and Weaknesses of Yahoo!, Google & MSN

by Ujwal Tickoo on October 6th, 2006

This post continues from my previous post Google’s Product Strategy Demystified. It is based on my notes from a podcast interview of John Battelle with Tom Raftery where John B comments on the Strengths & Weaknesses of Yahoo! Google and MSN.

Other Interesting Issues that John covers in the podcast:

On which company will overtake Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft?

John Battelle believes that some new company will overtake Google, Yahoo! or Microsoft — but doesnt know which one. The reason he feels is that once a company becomes large and gets used to its way of doing things and earning money, someone else speeds past by. I agree. Size killed Xerox. Size made IBM (IBM) lose out to Microsoft (MSFT) on the OS competition. Size is what is slowing down Microsoft in responding to Yahoo! (YHOO), Google (GOOG), MySpace, YouTube etc.

On Google’s Search Index

Index size is inherent in Google’s Business Model. Google needs to Index as much content as possible. The bigger it is the better it is. Google is the borker of information, distributing attention all over the place. When you are the distributor of attention you acquire value for that distribution. That is the cable company model. Same for telephone business. Google is in the same business.

On what MSN, Yahoo! and Google — do well or dont do well

MSN does well: Mail, IM and integration.
MSN Needs to Improve: Product Development and time to market. MSN needs to act like an internet company stop and acting like Microsoft

I agree with John’s views on what MSN needs to improve. However I don’t think that Microsoft nailed webmail. I have never been happy with Hotmail. In India during the late 90’s the joke was that Hotmail was called Microsoft SlowMail. It would take ages to log-into your account and refresh pages. Hotmail was my second email account after USA.NET went to paid subscriptions model. But soon Hotmail became so slow and unusable that I gave up on it. Yahoo Mail has stayed with me, served me extremely well and gained my trust. So what do I do with my Gmail account? I get all my online subscription emails thre. I don’t care what ads get served, as long as Google reads mainly my tech-subscription emails with its large sized mail box.

Yahoo! does well: understand that they are in service biz not in packaged goods business , good at integrating content, and creating User Interfaces responsive to customer demand

Yahoo! Needs to Improve: hasten the release of Publisher network which is incredibly strategic to their future.

Google does well: Really Good at Search. Google is god at new ideas business. But good ideas are not good enough if you dont know how to execute.

Google Not Good at: Merchendising (Amazon’s business) and Content (Yahoo’s business).

Continued…. Why Blog Media Companies like BoingBoin, GigaOm are Flourishing

Tags: 190, 196

POSTED IN: Amazon, GMail, Google, MSN, Microsoft, MySpace, Yahoo, YouTube