As I write this the financial world is busy slaughtering chickens and studying the entrails for a chance to glimpse the future of search advertising on the web (and guide shareholders towards the acquisition of shares that will pay off handsomely).
After a great deal of breath-holding and online noise Microsoft publicly announced that it was withdrawing its offer for Yahoo! therefore abandoning its strategy to buy into Yahoo’s Panama online advertising model and acquire, at a stroke, its team of developers and engineers. While publicly Yahoo! claims it is ready now to focus on its online web strategy and Microsoft is ready to pursue its own line of development using its “talented team of engineers” by refusing to play along both companies have lost a great opportunity to create a viable alternative to Google.
In the process online searchers and webmasters have lost out equally. The first by being subjected to the same old triad with Google delivering user-friendly, ever expanding (and expandable) products that really deliver what the customer wants and the latter by missing out on the opportunity to choose anyone but Google for their online advertising.
I know that Google delivers. There is nothing wrong with that. But there is nothing wrong with having viable choices and real competition either and at the moment we have not.
So why can’t (or won’t) Yahoo! and Microsoft make much of a dent in Google’s hegemony. Whatever their press releases said and implied, Yahoo! historically has been a diminished force that has gone on diminishing. They were the first with the search technology Google has perfected and have managed to come second, at one point drawing all their search results from the Google database (!). Microsoft got into the online game because they were suddenly afraid that something big was going on they did not understand. – the point is (for both Yahoo! and Microsoft) their business culture works against them. Yahoo! sees itself as an entertainment company and Microsoft as a corporate behemoth that’s comfortable dealing with other corporate behemoths and dictating terms of service to small business owners. The web is about none of these. It is about delivering service, fast, expertly and with the minimum of fuss on an individual basis.
In that respect both Yahoo! and Microsoft have failed and will continue to fail while Google, which understands the mentality of the individual web user, will continue to make inroads, eating, in the process into the traditional corporate pies Yahoo! and Microsoft have always regarded as their own.
This is not to say that neither Yahoo! nor Microsoft are incapable of reverse-engineering anything Google does. Patent infringement notwithstanding they are and they will but they are bound by their very approach and their very structure to always play catch up and on the web, real winners always lead. It really is that simple.
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