Why Yahoo and Google Still Don't Get It

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Nat Torkington
Sep. 07, 2004 11:37 PM
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Today I found out about Picasa, which Google acquired. It's an image archive/management package. And I found out about Farechase, which Yahoo acquired. It's like shopper.com for airfares, or something. I don't really know what they do, because I can't use them--they both require Windows. I know there are smart people at Google and Yahoo, but they obviously had no say in this. How will you get influencers to praise your product if they can't run it?

I see the world working like this: Tech reporters and widely-read people like Tim watch alpha geeks to figure out what's new and important. The general public learn from their alpha geeks and from tech reporters. So if you (generic firm) can't get the alpha geeks talking about your product, you face an uphill battle to get the general public aware of it and using it.

A disproportionately large number of alpha geeks and influencers use Mac OS X: James, Om, Rael, Tim, Randal, Cory, Mark, Ben, Jesse, Ask, Chris, Jeremy, .... Sure, not every alpha geek uses OS X, but can Yahoogle really afford to ignore the people to whom their target market turn to for advice?

So what should Yahoogle be doing? Not porting to the Mac, porting is hell. Take a lesson from Flickr. This is web gallery done right: HTML and Flash interfaces, web service as much as web server, aggressively multi-platform.

Flickr gets that the future of interaction lies further and further away from Microsoft Windows, whether in other desktop operating systems or handhelds or TVs or ... Should you only be able to find good fares when you're sitting at your home computer? Look at the popularity of webmail--people want their mail regardless of which computer they're sitting at. Digital photos are just as integral a part of people's lives. Flickr agggressively embraces this decentralized world, and that's why people are talking about it. And that's why nobody I pay attention to but John has blogged the two new dis-services from Yahoo and Google.

--Nat

Nat Torkington is conference planner for the Open Source Convention, OSCON Europe, and other O'Reilly conferences. He was project manager for Perl 6, is on the board of The Perl Foundation, and is a frequent speaker on open source topics. He cowrote the bestselling Perl Cookbook.

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Showing messages 1 through 10 of 10.

Google's not rushing to the mac market because of iPhoto
2004-09-15 00:47:09 AaronEgaas [Reply | View]

Google's not rushing to the mac image collection and manipulation market not because they are ignoring that market, its because they'd lose horribly to Apple's king of Photo storage, iPhoto. Picasa is basically a clone of it already, but its for windows. That's fine.

I don't think Google wants to waste all that development time just to lose horribly to a product that's already on everyone's mac. Its kind of like the whole windows and IE pre-installed on every wintel machine, but this time, the pre-installed software kicks the crap out of the newbie ;)

http://www.aaronegaas.com

Google's not rushing to the mac market because of iPhoto
2004-10-06 14:04:12 voodoofish [Reply | View]

I'm not so bothered about the Picasa software itself, since i seriously doubt i would ever use it over iPhoto, but it would be nice to have Hello support. Having said that, none of my friends would probably use it since they couldn't be bothered downloading it, and the fact that with Flickr you don't both have to be online at the same time means it's way more convenient.

My friends are really annoying though, they won't use anything other than Hotmail and MSN Messenger no matter how buggy, ugly, or inferior they are compared to any other service grrrrrr :-/

The harsh reality of irrelevance
2004-09-08 09:00:28 pixelgeek [Reply | View]

... because I can't use them--they both require Windows.

Welcome to the world of irrelevance.

Mass market applications can safely ignore OS X and Linux users. And they can pretty much safely ignore "alpga geeks" as well.

It is very sad but with 95% of the market businesses can plan their efforts around an all Windows world without fear of losing any appreciable revenue.

I recently added stats to my blogs and despite knowing a significant number of mac and Linux users the Mac users make up 5% of my hits and the Linux users are less than the rounding error limit that the stats package uses.

Sad but true.

Be happy that places like Flickr are trying to be open.

Here I go running my flap again
2004-09-08 07:14:08 aristotle [Reply | View]

First (and of course I didn't bother to spend the five minutes to look it up), how recent are those purchases? If they're fairly new, their new parent companies may not have finished an overhaul yet. Google has done that before — taken the foundation built by companies they purchased, worked on improvements internally, and eventually deployed the Google-flavoured version. It is only sensible to keep running the lesser product in the meantime.

That's the first and easiest interjection out of the way.

Secondly, I think you're putting too much emphasis on the tech reporters and alphageeks, here. Sure, they were important in getting the word out, but Google and Yahoo have grown a huge reputation by now (heck, the names permeate everyday life, no mean feat), and probably don't face an uphill battle at all to get the word out about new products. Sure, it's a nice bonus if the tech reporters pick up on it, and it might sour a few of the more “fastidious” to hear the tech reporters saying it won't work on alternative platforms, but that really doesn't make much difference to the “masses”. (Cf. Windows, Internet Explorer.)

Third, at least Google does offer one product which remains Windows-only: their Googlebar. Worse, it's IE-only. There is an open source clone for Mozilla that works on any system the browser runs on, but of course it's not endorsed. The question here is, how much loss does this annoying narrowmindedness really incur? One can only speculate.

I don't know.

I wish the tech reporters and alphageeks really had as much influence as you're assuming here, but I've gotten too cynical to really believe they do.

desktop vs web
2004-09-08 06:22:56 jamesodo [Reply | View]

There is a huge difference between organizing 100 emails that are 2KB each and 100 pictures that are 2MB each.
Sharing a few select pictures using Flickr is great but it's the organizing part of what Picasa is that might give Flickr some trouble.
I have at least 20 gigabytes of digital pictures from the past two years alone. Where can I get enough free webspace for that?
What would happen to my pictures if the hosting service closed? Web is for sharing, desktop is for organizing and archiving.

desktop vs web
2004-09-09 04:58:39 G_coupe [Reply | View]

James, I agree with your analysis. I rather think it will be some considerable time before we see a browser-based photo organising tool that is like this: http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=14275 ...

Almost, but not quite.
2004-09-08 01:27:05 bskahan [Reply | View]

Flickr is a nice concept but it doesn't work with Mozilla on Linux. Most of you reasons for site's to support OSX apply equally well to Linux.

Example Error

Almost, but not quite.
2004-09-08 09:03:47 bskahan [Reply | View]

I have gotten several replies from people who use flickr on Linux. Which is great to hear. I've tried it now on a bleeding edge debian based box and a stable mandrake box with the same results.

People seem to have it working with other distributions however.

Got it working.
2004-09-08 14:39:26 bskahan [Reply | View]

Flickr staff was very helpful and serious about supporting linux. Removing swf-player (the open source decoder) and reinstalling macromedia (just reinstall the same current version) fixed it. Mozilla seems to take swf-player over macromedia.

Almost, but not quite.
2004-09-08 06:11:59 micampe [Reply | View]

Uh? That never occurred to me and I use Flickr almost exclusively on Fedora Core 2 with Epiphany 1.2.7 and Macromedia Flash 7.0.25.
As an aside, I think also Zoto and PictureM deserve a mention both as photo service and as great web applications. They manage to do amazing things without help from Macromedia, everything is HTML and Javascript there. Zoto for example has drag and drop support with transparent thumbnails of the picutres and a superimposed badge with the number of pictures you're dragging. PictureM has nice slideshow features. Check them out, seriously cool stuff.

Showing messages 1 through 10 of 10.

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