TechAddress

Web Giants Are Stretched. It’s Time for Them to Tighten up.

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 02:30:04 +0000

I think it’s time that the Web giants of the West clean house and toss away what they don’t absolutely need to accomplish goals set by management. Why? Technological focus of the highly productive sort has given way to competitive hubris, and those two terms should remain exclusive from one another often as possible. Each of the Big Four - Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL - has displayed terrible redundancies in their own way, and needlessly so.

One of the most outstanding examples, perhaps, comes by way of Google. Google purchased YouTube some years aback, and its acquisition, while still not especially profitable, has come to dominate the field of Web video much the same way the company’s own search-advertising duopoly has grown. Still, Google Video survives. To be sure, they each serve different purposes. But why is that, exactly? Why work an ancillary angle? Wouldn’t it have been better to do away with Google Video by now and attend solely to YouTube?

Also, Google purchased Jaiku, a one-time strong competitor to Twitter that promoted itself heavily for the mobile crowd to great effect, but lost considerable ground in the last year do to the ways of popularity contest. What was the reasoning behind Google’s purchase? To get on the microblog wagon, of course. Yet, if the intention was good, Jaiku nonetheless gained little for its parent. So wouldn’t it be best to just…move on? Jaiku’s homepage signifies its status well at present. The announcement of Jaiku’s move into the Googleplex is still write large. Still.

Now, how about the smallest of the four, AOL. Seems innocent enough, trying to make things happen for itself. But perhaps it’s trying too many things, no? From the looks of it, AOL has only a few really solid efforts underway: its AIM service, its radio (plus Last.fm) projects, and its blogging network. Those are what make AOL sit unique from other giants, it seems, and which should be developed with vigor. Everything else appears ancillary. AOL Mail is still strong as far as users go, but in utility, it’s no market leader. Search? Three words: “Enhanced by Google.” Sure, its search and home news page are very much bread and butter to the entire operation, but again, AOL can’t survive forever on aid. It needs to find its own way. It should think less horizontal and more vertical. How best to make its most attractive properties better, in other words.

Microsoft is at this time a peculiar fellow. It has a reasonable amount of traffic, but its ambition may be too much of a fantasy. Google is very dominant in search, and while Microsoft would do well to remain in the game in order to pull in some coin to fund its Live services, to seek a real challenge with the king of the judge seems somewhat fantastical at the moment. Microsoft was hard after Yahoo, but for $44+ billion dollars, it might be better able to condition its own properties to serve users better. And that suite of full-fledged cloud office applications isn’t going to make itself. My last word about Microsoft for now: The company’s expansion of its original deal with Facebook to supply a search box for users something that I think is worth more to Microsoft’s future than doing anything really massive with Yahoo.

Speaking of Yahoo, it is one player that is so unfortunately confused about its plans for the future that it hasn’t yet managed to make an outright killing with its top properties. From far and wide, cries over the unrealized potential of Flickr have droned on and on and on again. Yahoo Mail, besides being visually refreshed, has remained largely unchanged. Yahoo Buzz, something which many consider to have a clear advantage over Digg, if only for its potential audience, is not displayed with any prominence on the Yahoo homepage. The user must select “More Yahoo Services” in order to gain access. For something which can make Yahoo seem more current and appear more content-rich from the get-go, it’s strangely second-tier. For goodness sake, Yahoo still features a link for GeoCities at its topmost domain. Poor prioritization for sure.

Here’s the thing. The roles of Internet giants are understandably difficult to manage. The carnal objective of enormous financial growth, mandated by the companies as well as the starseekers of Wall Street, is a massively tough nut to crack in and of itself, quarter after quarter. Brilliance is hard to repeat, after all, and sometimes there is only so much you can eek out of a particular business. The risk of having a decision deemed stupid and ineffectual by users and subsequently investors as well, is just added pressure that can only be conducive to cautiousness, and not meaningful progress.

Of course, being a giant also has its outstanding benefits. It means that you carry with your name a sizable amount of money, either in assets or in cold hard cash. Which you can experiment with very liberally, particularly in the startup market. But having the option to do so doesn’t necessarily mean you take it.

For a long time I’ve watched the Big Four mozy about and stretch themselves unnecessarily. I’ve seen things boom, bust, and languish to various degrees of boring. Sites and services launched afresh or have been purchased, and something or other has subsequently stagnated as a result. Yet all too often have those burdens been kept afloat. Why that is is a mystery. There’s no reason for it. They’re dead weight, and the sooner one is done with them the better. You have lower amount of vital statistics to watch over, giving you more opportunity to zero in on what really matters to their brands.

The fact is that excess fat is on everyone’s plate, and the more able one becomes at mimimizing one’s weaknesses, the more pronounced one’s strengths may grow. Really, sometimes it is that simple.