The latest agreement between Microsoft and Yahoo! brought back a few memories. The earlier days of the Web had several search engines-not unlike today, but the players were different. We had search engines like Alta Vista, which happened to be one of the stronger, along with Lycos, which wasn't a slouch either. Things have changed.
I'm talking about a period that was somewhere around 1996, perhaps '97. The world of the Web was much smaller then. I visited Yahoo! back then. Their offices were essentially on two floors, one those being only a lobby. The upstairs seemed like a football field of cubes. Everyone, except for the human resources officer, all had cubes. Jerry Yang had a cube; it was a nice cube, but it was still a cube, complete with four-foot walls. I thought it said a lot about Jerry.
That's a major departure from the offices today. if anyone were to visit Yahoo! today, they'd find at least five pretty large buildings on a fairly impressive campus (because I know I had meetings in the "E" building). As part of the work of a group of newspaper companies who put a cooperative agreement in place with Yahoo!, I visited several times.
The campus and its stateliness reminded me a bit of the newspaper industry. Buildings that appeared, at least on their exterior, to communicate size, power, and security, while on the inside, there was clearly a bit of concern about the company's future. I have to wonder if Yahoo! wouldn't be glad to go back to the good 'ole days of being up US 101 nearer to Santa Clara in more modest surroundings.
Yahoo!, even back in 1996, spoke of their market power. I had developed a collaborative relationship back then. In meeting with one of their marketing officers, I was struck by how certain they were of the future and their destiny as the company who would break through to dominate search on the World Wide Web. I asked, "who do you think comes out on top in the search engine competitive landscape", to which she replied, "all the other minor players will go away and it will come down to us and Alta Vista." There no "maybe"; there was no "I think..." There was such conviction in her voice; I remember thinking to myself that I didn't know whether she was right, but she was sure she was right.
Of course, that was all several months before I stumbled onto this little site that seemed to come out of nowhere called Google. When I think about it, I have come to believe that Yahoo! fell into the trap that many of us do. We see the competitive landscape in terms of only today and the competitors as a finite set; just the opposite is true. There is a moral to the story.
We all tend to lose sleep over the wrong things. We worry about the things that exist today or those things we can see and visualize today. While Yahoo! was worried about Lycos and Alta Vista, the real threat was being developed by a couple of guys Yahoo! had never heard of. Be dilligent-not just about those things you can see, but try to figure out where the next innovation will be coming from. If we do, we'll see the world as a much different competitive space and we may bring that next innovation to the market by seeing the world through an innovative lens.
And never let success go to your head. Yahoo! declared victory a little early. I wonder if Google is feeling a little less smug these days in view of the Yahoo!/Microsoft agreement.
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