Suddenly Yahoo seems to be in a roll. Ben Hammersly writes, Yahoo is the new Google. Google is the new Yahoo. Up is down, and black is white.Ben points out,"Google's reputation comes from three things: the quality of its search results, the cutting-edge research and prototypes it produces, and the interfaces it provides for other programs to tap into, known as their application program interface (API). Search, up to a point, is a matter of brawn over brains - throw more money and machines at indexing the web, and you'll get a better result. So it was the last two that really set Google apart".
- Google's Labs and API were held up as exemplars of a modern internet business, while Yahoo has learned its lesson. Research.yahoo.com, launched last month, is the same idea as labs.google.com - a showcase for new and interesting projects - but it's better. Unlike Google, Yahoo publishes its papers, names its researchers and says what it is up to.
- Google's API was also a thing of beauty when it launched. For programmers, the ability to query Google from inside your own programs was immensely useful. And just as Amazon and eBay have done with their APIs, the Google API produced an ecosystem of applications and programming techniques that relied on, and fed, Google's success. It was unique. Yahoo's own API is out, and it's seen to be better. It has more features, it's more complete, it's technically more elegant, and it's easier to use than Google's alternative.
- Yahoo maps, mail service with enhanced storage, Yahoo 360 all show advances being made by Yahoo
Ben's piece has invited a fierce defence from the google camp.
My Take: I agree with some of the defences said about google over there.Google has not moved ahead on newer arenas - and the biggest thing against google is that they did not do much on blogger - leave aside maintaining statusquo - blogger malperformed several occassions in the last two-three months and google not updating its image database for a long time( now it is said to be corrected) are things unexpected of it . While Yahoo's future vision is increasingly clear - Google is not publicly stating -whether its operating system vision or expanding on traditional strengths. It is certainly not the case that google has lost its sheen(In fact google is holding on to its search strengths) - its past track record sets very high expectation about Google - which it has to live upto. If only blogger has been bought over by Microsoft and all the malperformance had happened - the web would have been flooded with hateposts and messages.Google certainly has a glorious future - its just that the world is expecting to google to move fast and always retain the idea and action leadership. Yahoo's credible competition to google in newer arenas is realy good for the industry - it accelarates the pace of progress and provides more option to customers and pushes all to perform better and fast.
Category : Emerging Technologies
|
