In February 2006, I stipulated that Google was on the verge of becoming the next Yahoo. I did not mean it as a complement. This analysis came about as I was (again) watching Yahoo’s product line fracture.
Yahoo had a strange history of creating competing products. It was either a case of one part of a large company not aware of what another part of a large company was doing, or there was no cohesive strategy from leadership. (Maybe both?) At one point Yahoo had it’s own image sharing service, only later to acquire Flickr. The services were never merged into one, single useful product. Yahoo Images (which is now a image searching engine) limped along for awhile, then was eventually shut down. Similarly, Yahoo had MyWeb which was different than Yahoo Bookmarks, despite the fact they apparently did the same thing. Both of which were identical to Delicious, which Yahoo purchased and… you get the idea.
Along the way, Yahoo experienced lots of product drift and were usurped by Google. That we all know. We also know that Google is a very, very smart company. So why are they repeating Yahoo’s mistakes?
Farhad Manjoo has a fantastic article on Slate.com (link: Déjà Google) pointing out that Google seems to be repeating the same folly of Yahoo. Google is spinning out products that directly compete with other products they have already created. A few highlights:
- Newly launched Google Buzz will tell your friends where you are… duplicating Google Latitude which was launched last year
- Orkut already offered social media online profiles, but that didn’t stop Google from launching Google Profiles
- Google offers to save your bookmarks so they are available on any computer, but it is not-compatible with Chrome’s bookmarking feature that allows you to save your bookmarks so they are available on any computer.
Which brings me back to my original post from February 2006, Google is the Next Yahoo!, that points out that Microsoft could beat Google if Google accidentally becomes too much like Yahoo.
Looks like that is happening. OK, Microsoft it’s your move.
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