Posted by Ian Holsman
Fri, 01 Dec 2006 05:08:00 GMT
Ok.. I’ll admit I’ve never used google answers before, and as such i’m not going to comment on how good or bad it was.
What I like about the decision is that Google has the guts to fail. In all the management/innovation books I have read they keep talking about ‘Fast-Fail’ being one of the core things a company needs to understand if they want to be innovative and build really good things.
Fast fail is when someone has the balls to go up to a group and say.. this isn’t working.. lets kill it now, before it soaks up more time/energy/money. The thing you want is to learn from these failures, so you don’t repeat them.
It’s a hard call to make I’m sure, as the people working on answers would have devoted a lot of time and ownership into it. but it has to be done. It’s better for those engineers to go work on another project where they could add more value.
This ties in to yahoo’s peanut-butter manifesto as well. This is what happens when you don’t do fast-fail. you end up with all your resources tied up supporting things which aren’t really working, and the terms ‘black hole’ and sunk costs gets bandied about in meetings.
So Google is doing the best thing… I’d rather see them doing lots more things like answers as they are continually experimenting…. and some experiments don’t work..
Posted in Business Related | Tags fail, fast, google, yahoo | 3 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Sun, 23 Oct 2005 13:36:00 GMT
What was Microsoft thinking when it announced this deal?
If you belive the AOL buyout rumour where microsoft and Google+Comcast and potentially Yahoo are all vying to buy it this announcement makes no sense.
AOL currently has a 50m IM subscriber base, where both Yahoo and MSN has ve 25m a piece, and Google has 1m if it’s lucky.
So let’s imagine your a Google exec. you have a nice ad-revenue stream, and this GTalk thing is going to be a nice little earner if it could get some legs (user base)
Then on the grapevine you hear that AOL is up for sale, and MSN is interested.
now.. you think to yourself.. ok I could lose a bit of revenue, and the gtalk thing will be a bit harder now (Metcalfe’s network effect and all) but it is still doable…
and geess.. if we partner up with comcast we could make a offer as well, and get those 50m IM subscribers over to the ‘good’ side and they wouldn’t hurt our email user base either.. (and we can give the content stuff over to comcast who could make good use out of it). These users would make our dream come true.
So they make a matching bid. and the stories fly.
Now.. Imagine this exec’s horror when he finds that Yahoo + MSN are going to co-operate with IM.. He is seeing all his gtalk dream sink.. No one would be interested in it if Micrsoft buys AOL. They will all be using the other guys IM service and whatever VOIP solution they come up with..
All of a sudden this AOL deal got a lot more important for him. now it isn’t just a matter of losing 2.5-10% of it’s revenue base.. It is threatening it’s entry into the telco market. It NEEDS AOL even more now.. and it going to fight tooth and nail to get it.
If you were Microsoft why in heavens name would you want the other potential bidder to want AOL even more than it currently does?
Unless of course Microsoft + Yahoo don’t really want AOL in the first place, and are trying to get Google+Comcast to buy a really large lemon for a even bigger price.
Posted in Business Related | Tags aol, comcast, economics, google, microsoft, yahoo | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Mon, 19 Sep 2005 00:34:00 GMT
in Daring Fireball John talks about how google is not a ‘web os’, but a advertising company. Which I agree with, Google’s customers are the advertisers. But in order to grow at a rate they want to, and to protect their core business they need compete against the other search possibilities… which are Yahoo and Microsoft otherwise these companies could out-manuver them and make Google irrelavant in the medium term.
Google competes directly with Microsoft with MSN, MSN-Messenger, and HotMail. The largest threat (IMHO) to MS if Google develops some kind of office lookalike which will start affect sales. If I were Google, I would donate a couple of their staff to work on Star Office to make it a better product. (or fund some of the existing star-office developers to achieve the same thing).
I see the largest threat to Google from Microsoft is Microsoft’s dominance on the desktop. While people currently do searches from their browser and have choice on who they use, imagine if searching was more deeply integrated into the desktop, so that direct searches are no longer done, but they are done indirectly (commoditizing the search so that no one cares which engine serves the results).
Google also indirectly competes with them for staff, they even set up an office in Seattle to attract the softies over. How can you develop the next big thing if you don’t have the rocket scientists building it?
So this is why Google is offering more things that Yahoo and Microsoft currently do, and will continue to do so, and why Yahoo and Microsoft will continue to try and improve their search, as well trying to make it more of a commodity at the same time.
Personally I hope all three of them keep each other in check all releasing brilliant things and giving me the surfer more choices, and my work the content-provider more traffic. I think the worst possible outcome is if we have a winner, as it would mean less innovation overall.
Posted in General | Tags coopetition, google, microsoft, yahoo | no comments | no trackbacks