Yahoo, MSN, Google…. Who will be the winner, and the impact on our world

An article in the Economist and exchange of emails with Management Consultant V.N. Bhattacharya triggered these thoughts. The Economist published an article "Yahoo!'s personality crisis", where the author wonders whether Yahoo!'s positioning as 'all things to all men' will prove effective. Yahoo!'s strategy has not excited the stock market. (Yahoo is valued at 60% of Googles market capitalization). Look at the portfolio what each has to offer and they look very similar. Search, Mail, Maps, Shops, Groups. So one wonders what all the hoopla is about, is this really a Positioning game, something like what came first, strategy or success.

Taking a look back at the not so distant history of Google, it is fascinating to observe what Google did to Yahoo and what Microsoft did to IBM. Microsoft got on to the not so hip PC Operating Systems market by riding on IBM. Google was the search engine for Yahoo and well, stumbled onto a much larger market of "Search". Yahoo was and is a Portal providing a host of information and tools for its users. Did Google really start off by thinking that one day it will be bigger than Yahoo, did Microsoft really know that one day it will eclipse IBM? Doubt it. What it does point to is that opportunity catches up with an outstanding business model or technology.

There is no doubt about Google's ability to power search. Google's desktop search tool sits on your PC operated by a Windows OS, uses Windows' internals and does a better job of searching documents generated by Microsoft products. So no doubt skill precedes strategy. To Google's credit it stayed to its core competency. Its email is not a copy of any other email provider but revolved around its search technology, the core proposition is - store and retrieves as many emails as you want. Google Maps, Ad sense, etc. all leverage "search".

Yahoo on the other hand is leveraging its community and the offer of "The only place anyone needs to go to find anything, communicate with anyone, or buy anything,"

There are some fundamental differences in the way Google sees the world and the way Yahoo does, and this is why the flavour of the services offered by them differs. The Economist points out that "Google, in short, is at heart a technology firm. It is about algorithms. Yahoo! sees itself as a media firm. Google says 'trust the machine'; Yahoo! says 'trust the editor or the community.' Its DNA is editors and making recommendations to other people. Consider, the difference between the firms' news sites: Google's story list is picked by computers with no human intervention; Yahoo!'s is edited by journalists."

What is the end game, between these two they will dictate what we find on the web, how it is presented and how people interact with each other on the web and consequently on so many other aspects of our lives. No wonder recently I witnessed Librarians discussing what life is like in a world powered by Google. Will there be libraries at all? Will magazines like Economist even exist? Is there a role for an aggregator (I would say Economist and Businessgyan in a very broad sense are aggregators of information)? Or will their forms change. (Well readers, you will soon see avatars of Businessgyan which will ride the world created by Google.) There is no escape.

The information channels are converging and consolidating. Today it is easier than ever for individuals to speak to the world at large without getting muffled by the control of large media houses and their views on what news should be. There will be a tectonic shift in what we perceive as news, how we seek news and how we communicate with each other. This world will be made of a few large players like Google and Yahoo (they might be replaced by others) who provide the platforms for us to create content, exchange it with others and interact with one another, and there will be a lot of small players who will either provide a context or meaning to that information, or will be the sages in their areas of expertise, people will visit them on the net for the pure thought and wisdom that they have to give.

The fact that one owns printing presses, has control on the distribution channels or has a big stash of funds will start to matter a lot less in the information world. This is the death knell for media as we know it, long live pure thought and expertise.

The author is the Chief Catalyst of businessgyan. His area of interest include business strategy and innovation. For feedback and more information, mail: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Issue BG54 Sept05

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