Recently, I have been reading The Secret Life of Water by Masaru Emoto. [Amazon.com link] He describes an interesting analogy regarding growing tomato plants with hydroponics.
Using hydroponics, a single tomato plant can produce thousands of fruits over its life. If you are like me and plant tomatoes in your backyard every year, a few dozen fruits is a plentiful harvest.
But the hydroponics gel the plant lives in provides so many nutrients that the plant does not expend energy growing roots to search out water and food. Because of this, the plant can devote all its resources to doing what it does best – producing big, red, juicy fruits.
Emoto then compares this to a job environment. If a person can find the supportive foundation, they can fully devote themselves to what they do best, producing exceptional fruit of good labors.
That analogy also spoke to me as a search marketer. When Google first began indexing Web content, its sole focus was producing one thing – the most relevant results. Google was growing in its own hydroponics lab.
Clearly that focus paid off. In just a few years, Google steadily gained market share and has become nearly unrivaled. Why? Because Google created an environment where only one thing mattered – search.
Yahoo!, on the other hand, took a different approach. Instead of focusing its energy on a single thing, the company produced many products for many different niches. The homepage became a portal; it offered email, instant messaging, chat rooms and any number of other things. As a result, Yahoo! lost favor with searchers and become what every other engine became – not quite Google.
But now the story is changing. Google is no longer that tomato plant devoting all its resources to growing a single fruit. Google is now wiring San Francisco with Wi-Fi, offering email, instant messaging, VoIP, video, satellite photography, and probably 50 other products still in beta.
Wouldn’t it be ironic if Yahoo! unseated Google because Google became the next Yahoo!?
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