Anu (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} azooey) wrote,@ 2006-07-22 22:57:00 |
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Innovation and Size
Update: In another interesting article, NYTimes points out - its Consistency Vs. Wow!
... dont seem to love each other's company. If innovative skills were any indication, Microsoft's pulse has long gone silent. As Guy Kawasaki would put it, if it were daisy wheel printer company, it would think innovation means adding Helvetica in 24 points.
Or if Microsoft were just Microsoft, it would set out to follow someone else's curve.
May be its gotta do with the fact that the bigger you get, the fewer risks you take? Which leads me to the next question - is there an optimum level to which a business entity should grow, beyond which it would only hurt itself?
Update: In another interesting article, NYTimes points out - its Consistency Vs. Wow!
..this penchant for speed and innovation can cause Google to zoom past the basics. When asked about the lack of an address book in Google Maps in an interview last fall, Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president for search products and user experience, said it was a gap in the product. She said it was much easier to get the company’s engineers to spend time developing pioneering new technology than a much more prosaic address storage system.
There are risks in each approach. Google tends to introduce a lot of new products and then watch to see what works. This has the potential to alienate users if there are too many half-baked ideas or false starts. At the same time, Yahoo risks being seen as irrelevant if it tries to put so many features into each product that it is always months late to market with any good idea.
This is a particularly interesting soundbite:
“Yahoo has lost its appetite for experimentation,” said Toni Schneider, a former product development executive at Yahoo who is now chief executive of Automattic, a blogging software company. “They used to be a lot more like Google, where someone would come up with a cool idea and run with it. While Yahoo’s processes have become too bureaucratic, it is still attracting an audience, Mr. Schneider said. “Google’s products may be more innovative, but at the end of the day, Yahoo is pretty good at nailing what the user really wants.”
The article continues..
So far, outside of the Web search business, neither company appears to be able to make a significant dent in the position of the other. Both companies are gaining users as AOL and MSN decline. Yahoo is the No. 1 site for e-mail and online news in the United States, while it is second in instant messaging, behind AOL, according to data from comScore Media Metrix.
Google, by contrast, is much less consistent. Its map service is now a very close third behind MapQuest and Yahoo. And the two-year-old Gmail is now the No. 4 e-mail service in the country, with 8.6 million users in June. That is not bad in a market where people do not switch e-mail addresses casually. But over the last year, according to comScore, Yahoo added 11.8 million e-mail users, more than Gmail’s entire user base.
Over the last several years, Yahoo has devoted so much of its resources to building up its search business that it has been slow to improve many of its other offerings. This has allowed Google to gain the initiative in areas like e-mail and maps. Indeed, even in stock market information — where Yahoo Finance is the dominant product — Google was the first to offer an interactive stock-price graph, a feature Yahoo has just started testing.
Sergey Brin, the company’s co-founder and its president of technology, said in an interview last week that he had been encouraging engineers to develop their ideas as add-ons for existing Google products, rather than as stand-alone services. For example, after Google Talk failed to attract much of a user base, the company added an instant message feature to Gmail that allows users to chat with people on the same Web page that displays their e-mail.
With this approach, Mr. Brin said, Google can take advantage of the users it already has, rather than trying to build new followings for each new offering.
Meanwhile, Yahoo says it is now trying to emulate Google’s faster method of creating products. Like most big companies, it used to develop software by first creating a comprehensive design that defined how features would be written and tested. Instead, it is now trying what is known as a scrum method, where it will plan, build and test parts of a product every 30 days..
There are risks in each approach. Google tends to introduce a lot of new products and then watch to see what works. This has the potential to alienate users if there are too many half-baked ideas or false starts. At the same time, Yahoo risks being seen as irrelevant if it tries to put so many features into each product that it is always months late to market with any good idea.
This is a particularly interesting soundbite:
“Yahoo has lost its appetite for experimentation,” said Toni Schneider, a former product development executive at Yahoo who is now chief executive of Automattic, a blogging software company. “They used to be a lot more like Google, where someone would come up with a cool idea and run with it. While Yahoo’s processes have become too bureaucratic, it is still attracting an audience, Mr. Schneider said. “Google’s products may be more innovative, but at the end of the day, Yahoo is pretty good at nailing what the user really wants.”
The article continues..
So far, outside of the Web search business, neither company appears to be able to make a significant dent in the position of the other. Both companies are gaining users as AOL and MSN decline. Yahoo is the No. 1 site for e-mail and online news in the United States, while it is second in instant messaging, behind AOL, according to data from comScore Media Metrix.
Google, by contrast, is much less consistent. Its map service is now a very close third behind MapQuest and Yahoo. And the two-year-old Gmail is now the No. 4 e-mail service in the country, with 8.6 million users in June. That is not bad in a market where people do not switch e-mail addresses casually. But over the last year, according to comScore, Yahoo added 11.8 million e-mail users, more than Gmail’s entire user base.
Over the last several years, Yahoo has devoted so much of its resources to building up its search business that it has been slow to improve many of its other offerings. This has allowed Google to gain the initiative in areas like e-mail and maps. Indeed, even in stock market information — where Yahoo Finance is the dominant product — Google was the first to offer an interactive stock-price graph, a feature Yahoo has just started testing.
Sergey Brin, the company’s co-founder and its president of technology, said in an interview last week that he had been encouraging engineers to develop their ideas as add-ons for existing Google products, rather than as stand-alone services. For example, after Google Talk failed to attract much of a user base, the company added an instant message feature to Gmail that allows users to chat with people on the same Web page that displays their e-mail.
With this approach, Mr. Brin said, Google can take advantage of the users it already has, rather than trying to build new followings for each new offering.
Meanwhile, Yahoo says it is now trying to emulate Google’s faster method of creating products. Like most big companies, it used to develop software by first creating a comprehensive design that defined how features would be written and tested. Instead, it is now trying what is known as a scrum method, where it will plan, build and test parts of a product every 30 days..
