There Must be a Bunch of Yahoos Running That Company.
Do you remember not so long ago (around the turn of the last century) when Web Portals were all the rage? Starting mostly as web browsers
in the mid-1990s, an all-out fight developed among old media companies
to capture a “sticky space” on the internet. Newbies to the Web needed a
place to call “Home”, and for awhile, portals seemed to be that place.
As the Web matured Netscape became a part of America Online, the Walt Disney Company bought Go.com, and Excite and @Home became a part of AT&T. Lycos, another early entrant sold out to Network Solutions. Other portals started out as web directories (Yahoo!) or search engines (Excite, Lycos, AltaVista, Infoseek, and Hotbot).
There was a rush to expand services
to portal users, including free email, customization features for news,
weather and sports, chatrooms and instant messaging. All of these
features were designed to make users stay longer, thus exposing them to
more paid advertising.
The
portal craze, with "old media" companies racing to outbid each other
for Internet properties, flamed out in 2000 and 2001. Disney pulled the
plug on Go.com, Excite went bankrupt and its remains were sold to
iWon.com. Yahoo and MSN remained successful portals until the
simplicity of Google’s interface and its unmatched page-loading speed
took millions of users away, apparently for good.
With
all of that history and Yahoo! looking more and more like an old media
company, which just happens to do business on the Web, I was not
surprised to read an LA Times article
this week that quoted Jerry Yang, Yahoo! CEO as having a vision that
“Yahoo become the home page of choice by connecting computer users to
what they care about”. From his office in Santa Monica, California,
Senior VP, Scott Moore, who made his name at Yahoo! overseeing news,
sports and finance (speaking of old media information) will now also get
a crack at entertainment, including games and video.
Currently,
Yahoo! Has a My Yahoo! Beta available, but when I tried it, a bog box
popped up with a swirly thing that said “Loading”. I am sad to say that
it never fully loaded and I never got to customize my own page.
Contrast this with iGoogle, which allows a limited portal offering, but
loads in seconds and is customized and ready to go in 30 seconds. Good
luck to Yahoo and their attempt to “turn back time”. It didn’t work for
Cher and it hasn’t worked for the military planners of our world, who
are always planning to “fight the last war”.
While researching this article, I did have fun visiting old portal sites. When I got
to Excite and jiggled it enough to cough up My Excite from before the
dot-com meltdown, I was thrilled to see my old stock list still there.
The only problem was that half the stocks I had invested in back then
are no longer in business today. Yahoo is still there, but will it
still be an independent corporation when I go back to My Stocks in
another seven years?
Although Excite itself is not much
more than a feeder site for iWon’s ridiculous “money giveaway site”, it
has some great features. In less than five minutes I had My Excite
customized to show “My” Weather (in three different cities), “My”
Sunrise/Sunset, “My” Tides (in Santa Monica Bay), “My” Moon
(Phase/Rise/Set), “My” (beleaguered) Stocks and “My” Columnists. Wow!
Or should I say, “Yahoo!?” That information was so “sticky”; I
bookmarked it and plan to go back often.
Google maintains that their
“motivation isn’t to provide sticky services”. Isn’t it great when “old
energy” (Yahoo!) challenges “new energy” (Google). Gee, I wonder who
is going to win this one.
By James McGillis at 12:17 PM | Technology | Comments (0) | Link
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