Google's Offspring: Taking Baby Steps
from the a-little-early-to-judge dept
Everyone's jumping on the Google backlash bandwagon, it seems. Business Week has an article which looks at two of Google's "offspring": Google News and Froogle, the Google shopping site, and concludes that they don't stand up to the competition. It's amazingly early in the game for them to judge that. Both sites are very clearly beta sites, and Google has a long history of throwing up ideas onto their site long before they're fully baked in order to get real users pounding away on them. It's way too premature to compare a Google News to Yahoo's News site, or a Froogle to a Yahoo Shopping site. At this point, I'd even say the two sites have different goals, and each do some things better than the other. What should perhaps worry Yahoo (and which pretty clearly does), is what comes out of these "beta" sites in a year or two.
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And the fact that the two's business models are di
However, the business models of Google and Yahoo are so insanely different that it is hard to believe that anyone has tried to draw comparisons between them. Yahoo is purely a business model, "lets see how much money we can squeeze from our users," while Google's model is "lets see how much involvement we can get from the user, and maybe make a little money on the side."
Google news has no ads, a purely customer centric view, and consolidates the works of others into a nice, free-for-all format (obviously clicking on the link will bring up the full article, from the producer's website with all the ads.) Yahoo pops up ads left and right, and is extremely obnoxious about it, because after all, they have to pay for all the wonderful services they provide (sarcasm alert.)
So the only comparison you could hope to provide is one between the two are their business models.
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Dumb Comparison
The author has been taken in by the slick marketing hype of storing credit card information and other personalization gimmicks that are almost useless. I don't mind storing my information at Amazon, but I don't want to be a captive to their limited catalog. If they have the best price, it will show up in Froogle!
Score another for bone-headed analysis
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