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Yahoo! just redesigned the Yahoo.com home page, its crown jewel for a decade. The big change is a bar on the left with widgets that display updates from Facebook, Gmail, New York Times and some 60 other sources. The company made a big deal of it, but on the whole it’s failed to impress.

I won’t regurgitate the bucketfuls of painstakingly-written criticism of the redesign itself that I’ve read over the past few days. In any case it’s too early to measure the impact of this change. I think the problem with the lukewarm, even negative reviews was with how Yahoo! announced the change to the world. In other words, this was a communications, not an execution problem.

Why everyone said “Ho-Hum”
The verdict is that this is old hat, and too little to make a difference – and there’s reason to be skeptical. The web has seen at least two major paradigm shifts since the late 1990s (first search and then social media), but Yahoo! has persisted with the original portal paradigm – making money off visitors to its home page by keeping them on its properties. But Yahoo! now ranks 2nd behind Google as the most visited property on the web – and Google makes money by sending people away from its search page!

Yahoo! is under tremendous pressure to 1. innovate and 2. stay relevant in the future. Any move by the company needs to score very well on these two parameters. Redesigning a home page, however dramatically, is not such a move.

Let your users say how great it is
Any pragmatist at Yahoo! would have anticipated that news of a home page redesign would not be seen as game-changing by itself – either by Yahoo’s users or by its advertisers [1].

That’s why it probably made more sense to simply spread awareness of the impending redesign than to generate buzz and create hype. CEO Carol Bartz called it “most significant change in our home page since the company’s inception”. So what? While the redesign effort was probably significant internally (money, time, CEO attention), it’s presumptious to assume users will find it just as significant. Bring out the tom-tom drums after your users have given you the thumbs-up.

As for advertisers, Yahoo! would probably have been far better off sharing metrics with them on a one-on-one basis after the launch. Display new targeting capabilities. Show user adoption rates. Show clickthrough statistics. Things that will bring a grin to advertisers’ faces, especially when they’re under pressure to get the most bang for buck with dramatically reduced budgets. Of course, all this is only if the redesign really works.

In other words, it’s time for Yahoo!, in an infinitely more transparent world, to put its money where its mouth is.

[1] No kidding. Tapan Bhat, Sr. Vice President at Yahoo, crowned himself Supreme Emperor of Unintentional Irony by declaring that the new home page would put Yahoo! at the “center point of people’s lives online.”

Mozilla CEO John Lilly on the number of fast, capable browsers in the market:

“The world is a lot different from a year ago, and we have three brand new browsers and there is a lot more competition and as a result the users are getting a lot more technology…”

“… I think it is uncomfortable, because our rivals have 2-3 times the magnitude of people and resources, and they are relentless.”

The state of the browser market pretty much proves that it’s impossible for an open source project to remain a popular front-end application for too long.

A successful open source project will see one of two trends:

- Commercial entities, each with its own USP will pick, modify and integrate portions of the project into their own products. This is what’s happening with Firefox. (Chrome, according to Google, used ” components from Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla’s Firefox”). Firefox as an open source project is likely to thrive, but its best features and technology will probably find their way into more popular commercially-backed browsers [1].

- It will see widespread adoption, but on back-end IT infrastructure instead of the desktop. Linux and *BSD are examples of this. I guess this is because after a point, the marginal cost of polishing the UI is more than what developers are willing to bear, and that end users demand more. Regardless, the core functionality of such applications is on par with/often superior to commercial alternatives, so a combination of this + low price point makes them an attractive choice for back-end deployment [2].

[1] Android was a commercially-backed open source project (based on Linux kernel 2.6) from the beginning, so I guess we’ll treat it like Chrome.

[2] This isn’t a value judgement on the quality of open source products, or the viability of the open source development model itself. The past couple of decades do seem to have proved, though, that end-user open source applications are tough to build and sustain in their original form.

When it comes to the Internet in India, the low-hanging fruit has beeen picked, across sectors. Think Travel. Books. Jobs. Dating. Electronics. Money. In his post today, Rajesh Jain lists a few more: Search (dominated by Google), News (Rediff, NDTV, CNN-IBN), Email (Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Rediff), Cricket (Cricinfo/ESPN), Video (YouTube/Google).

Online pioneers have lapped up the biggest brands and most popular goods: the largest cities, the biggest hotel chains, the most popular travel destinations, the widest marriageable demography, the most desirable gadgets, the most viral videos, the news everybody reads, the the matches everyone watches.

Now comes the hard part. The cities only a few want to travel to [1], the outliers for whom it isn’t easy finding a match [2] , books in regional languages, people with odd skills, niche but tremendously useful gadgets, highly technical videos. There’s a market for all those. In aggregate, they’re as large and lucrative as those that have already been monetized [3].

Then there’s an even larger market – for individual professional services. The mother of all yellow pages, with a location-based and rating-based component. One that connects me to the nearest puncture shop when my car has a flat on a stretch of highway (and takes Rs. 10 for that connection), directs me to the nearest ATM in any city, to the most reliable service center for my phone.

There is no technological barrier to setting up these businesses anymore (you really don’t need broadband for most of this – just plain Internet access, and in some cases, a cellphone). What makes this hard is convincing small businesses/individuals to sign on. Building trust and credibility. Selling to Jet Airways is much easier than to Pravin Puncturewalla on a random national highway. If you’re willing to tackle that, you have a successful business.

Finally, Rajesh has a compelling vision of the “now-new-near” web, which you should read. I think that “niche” is about as much the future as the others. I also think that “now” and “new” are synonymous for the vast majority of cases, so I propose that tomorrow’s web will be the “now-near-niche” web (built around the evolving Internet Operating System)

[1] RedBus.in is doing a spectacular job with that, by my estimates. Driving to work today I spotted a travel service that did a Hyderabad-Kolhapur (!) bus route. And hey presto, Redbus.in has that route listed.

[2] Secondshaadi barely scratches the surface, but hey, it’s a start.

[3] Yes, yes. It’s the same old tired Long Tail phenomenon. Let’s set aside discussions of how cool the phenomenon itself is and why it works, and explore how you can build businesses in India with it.

Yesterday and today
The Web has been through two major evolutionary stages, and we are seeing some major activity in the third evolutionary stage.

The first was the “early web” – through most of the 90s and until the dot-com bust. People accessed content through directories and portals, and the content itself was static web pages.

The second was what was dubbed (retrospectively) “Web 1.0” [1] Search went mainstream, and we also began to see a lot of dynamic content (think classifieds on craigslist and books on Amazon).

The third stage is what we’ve called “Web 2.0” in its early forms and “social media” as focus has shifted from a loose set of open standards and technologies (RSS, OPML, AJAX, Ruby on Rails, CSS, HTML5, Webkit, Flash, SyncML, OAuth) to the services that have been built with them.

Within this latest stage of evolution, developments in the last three years or so have been about putting together the guts of what Tim O’Reilly called the “Internet Operating System” to truly integrate the Internet into our daily lives. We’re reaching a stage of maturity with these internals (that is, growth/focus/interest is slowing), and are seeing an acceleration in the activity around applications and services built on top of them.

Tomorrow and beyond
But I think there’s still tremendous competition for some platforms that will form the guts of the Internet Operating System. Fred Wilson talks about aspiring to be a platform:

I think, that if you don’t want to be [an Internet] platform, then I don’t know what you should be aspiring to be. I mean, I don’t know that there is anything else that you would want to be.

The search system is pretty much Google and the location system is Google Maps. The iTunes Music Store and YouTube are the digital entertainment system, and Twitter makes an extremely strong case for the messaging system. But there’s still no dominant payment system for the web. There’s still no dominant scheduling/calendaring system yet, no dominant remote storage system and most critically, no identity system. And this is nowhere close to being a complete list.

As a parent, can you subscribe to your child’s school’s football coaching team calendar with the playground location embedded, sign up for it by paying the fees through your mobile phone and have your car’s GPS give you turn-by-turn directions to the ground on practice days following the least-congested route based on real-time crowdsourced information? Not yet.

Until these systems are in place, there is an upper limit on what we can make applications do, how deeply we can integrate these applications into our physical world. The “next Google/Twitter/Facebook” is going to be a company that creates a credible missing platform.

The top-level applications that build upon existing platforms will be either be single-purpose applications (Evernote is one example) or “glue” companies, those that tie platforms together. Don’t expect to see a billion-dollar company out of them in their current form. [2]

[1] The analogy with the World Wars is hard to miss. Until WW2, the First World War was known just as the Great War. Until sometime in 2005, “Web 1.0″ was just the Web.

[2] That’s not to say that they’re not worth investing in. I’m saying that next-generation services can only become mainstream once the plumbing is in place – and to take advantage of new platforms, these top-level applications will need to evolve significantly.

Related stuff around the web you ought to read:

Techcrunch announced PubSubHubbub, a protocol to speed up delivery of RSS and Atom feeds (5 August 2009)

Dare Obasanjo on Google’s possible stab at an identity solution, the WebFinger protocol (15 August 2009)

GigaOM announces the release of Microsoft Internet Explorer 8

So far [Microsoft] has been on the losing side of the equation, ceding market share to its upstart rivals, all of whom are touting ease of use, simplicity, security and speed. Microsoft’s browser chief, Mike Nash, thinks the new IE 8.0 has got all that and more.

So true, except that none of it matters to Microsoft. If it cared about  “simplicity, security and speed”, it’d install Firefox + extensions with every copy of Windows.

It’s become pretty clear that the only way you can make money off a browser is by driving traffic from it to a search engine results page with advertisements. That’s how Mozilla makes over 80% of its revenue – driving traffic to Google from its search box and its default home page.

Earning revenue from ads on Microsoft Live Search pages through IE traffic is the only imperative driving IE development. And its getting costlier by the day to keep up with the competition.

iPhone is revolutionary not just because of its (multi-touch) touchscreen. There are, after all, other touchscreen phones on the market, and none have achieved iPhone’s popularity. Why?

iPhone is revolutionary not because of its Internet browser. Mobile Safari has limitations that other browsers don’t – most notably the lack of Flash support, no text search, no scrolling to the end, among others. But iPhone users are among the most heavy users of the web. Why?

It turns out that when you put both these features together, you end up with something very different.

The web browser is one of the most mouse-heavy applications on your (desktop/laptop) computer. Maintaining that experience on the mobile phone is tough when you have to manipulate physical keys. Open a web page in a browser on your computer and imagine moving the cursor using only the arrow keys.

Your finger on a touchscreen is the best proxy for a mouse on a mobile phone.

This is, in essence, what makes iPhone so compelling. There are awesome touchscreen phones with average browsers, and great browsers trapped in keypad-based phones. iPhone has managed to bridge that gap. And how.

Being able to choose to be contacted by either voice, IM or SMS is an extremely attractive proposition. Using all three from the same device, though, is the holy grail of unified communication. With VoIP, smartphones and IM, we might be getting pretty close to that.

Right now, your instant messaging contact list, and your phone/SMS contact list are disparate and independent. Your contact’s IM status tells you nothing about where he/she is, or if he/she can take a call. Is it possible to

• Integrate both contact lists into one?
• Set one real-time status that all your contacts can check?

The answer will, very soon, be yes.

Same Network

A mobile phone is already capable of making calls, receiving SMSes and running an instant messaging client. But since phone calls and SMS are sent over one network type (Voice) and Mobile IM over another (GPRS/EDGE/3G), there’s no unification between these services.

However, when WiFi coverage is widely available, or when you can make and receive calls over your packet-data oriented 3G network, the line begins to blur, and then altogether disappear. Applications like Fring, which integrate your phone contacts list and Gtalk list, already make that possible. If you can make VoIP calls, you can talk to your contact by voice or text.

The Possibilities

At that point of time, your status message indicates you real-life communication status. One could, for instance, check if a contact is open to receiving SMS only, or having a short IM conversation, or receiving calls, or none at all. This goes beyond the “Available”, “Busy”, “In a meeting” statuses.

If you’re on a phone call, your IM status could indicate that automatically, so people getting in touch with you could leave you an SMS/IM message without having to first call you and check if you’re busy on a call. You could indicate if you’re driving, sleeping or having dinner and have it show up on your friends’ mobile chat list.

If you’re in a meeting, simply setting your IM status to “Busy” could automatically cancel all calls made to you and pop up an IM chat box on your caller’s phone so he/she can send you an IM instead.

Stretching this, implementing a multi-way voice conference wouldn’t be any different from a multi-way chat. Additionally, with text-to-speech and speech-to-text, some participants could write and read text, others could speak and hear voice – in the same conversation (say one’s in a movie hall, the other is driving – they’d never be able to speak with today’s state of tech).

Adding location to the mix throws up some interesting possibilities. If you can display your location as part of your IM status, your friends nearby could sign up for notifications and call you to meet up – all from the same device. Or if you’re waiting to call someone until he/she reaches office? Set an alert for when your contact’s location changes to his office locality.

Conclusion

Not only are we “integrating voice and data” – that’s been on the cards for long – but we’re also integrating people and devices, using features of one to enhance our experience with the other.

How long do you think it’ll be before we get here? Will telecom companies try to block this, given that they won’t be able to charge per-call any longer?

(This post began as a reply to a comment question on my previous blog post about iPhone 3G. It’s also a complete re-write of an earlier post.)

My experience with the Internet on my Nokia N82 has been more than satisfying, but that might well be a result of my usage pattern. Your mileage may vary. And yes, my ideal internet-access device would be iPhone, but I’ve already written about why iPhone is a no-no for me.

Email

During my commute, I process email I received the previous evening and overnight. Since the ride is frequently too bumpy to type fast, I avoid replying until I’m in my office (though I send the occasional one-sentence reply through the app). I use the Gmail App to label, star, archive and delete email.

Bulk processing email like this is faster on the Gmail App than it is on the desktop! The Gmail App has handy shortcuts (press 7 twice to delete, 8 twice to mark as spam and delete, 9 twice to archive, “*” to mark as star. It also pre-fetches email so you don’t wait for minutes on end for pages to load.

Feeds and updates

The Google Reader interface for iPhone works just as fine on the S60 browser. With prefetching, ability to star, share, share with notes, and mark entire feeds and folders as read, I can process feeds as fast on my phone as I can from my laptop. I also catch up on Twitter with the S60 browser. m.twitter.com is fast, and doesn’t feel like you’re compromising on the experience because you’re using a mobile-adapted interface.

Microblogging

The same S60 browser and m.twitter.com let me send tweets while on the go. I’d love to post via SMS, but the facility seems to be “unavailable temporarily” since May at least.

News

I use Google News India and the New York Times mobile page for Indian and World news respectively. Both sites have awesome mobile interfaces, and render very well on the S60 browser.

Incidentally, you can view pages either in landscape or portrait mode by just tilting the phone using the built-in accelerometer on the N82. I scan tweets in portrait mode and my feeds and news in landscape mode.

Social Networking

A few months ago, Google release a mobile-adapted interface for Orkut. Like all of Google’s mobile services, Orkut mobile is simple and well-designed, with support for viewing profiles, photos, scrapbooks, birthday reminders and activity updates – all of what you’d use on the web. I don’t see much support for communities or applications, and I’d prefer it stay that way. I don’t like Orkut’s implementation of either.

Instant Messaging

I’m not a big fan of instant messaging, and certainly not one of those who’s online but “Busy” all day long. If I do have to ping someone on Google Talk, though, Fring is the app I use. The competition (apart from Ebuddy) tends to be either horribly designed or terribly engineered. Or both. Fring lacks notification on the phone’s front screen (For Nokia, I can imagine using Active Standby to display “New IM from so-and-so”. Google’s managed it with their Search Box).

It’s also a VoIP client. Rohan writes in: “My phone is WiFi-enabled and I have a Skype unlimited connection. I’ve configured Skype within Fring, so when I connect my mobile through WiFi to the local LAN, I can make almost free voice calls (VoIP calls) to 32 countries using Skype on Fring.”

The Series 60 Browser

All of my mobile web access is now through the default vanilla yet stunningly capable S60 browser. It has support for multiple windows – invaluable for opening links to websites from Twitter, support for SSL (when I check Gmail from the browser), one-click zoom in/zoom out, and the mini-map feature – viewing the entire page, reduced, on your screen, and scrolling through it instead. Invaluable for scrolling through long pages.

What’s your mobile applications list? And how does it fit into your daily lifestyle?

So my Thinkpad’s hard disk (a standard Hitachi 2.5″ 4200 RPM 80GB HDD) died Saturday evening. It began making ghastly noises all of a sudden, signaling imminent mechanical failure. I shut down the computer immediately, and on restarting, a BSOD informed me my boot volume was un-mountable.

I haven’t tried to recover any data yet, but that disk contains my entire music collection, and pretty much everything from my IIMK days. Tremendous loss. However, lessons have been learnt.

I’m going to use this post to chronicle how I’m getting my laptop functional again, the applications I use – both on the desktop and online, and strategies I’m using to move as much data online as possible.

Recovery

I had an external 120GB HDD (the same Hitachi make), which I plugged into the Thinkpad. And installed my copy of Windows Vista on it. After that, I downloaded and installed several Windows Vista device drivers for the Thinkpad R50. It took me about 4 hours from crash to a working (but data-less) machine.

Local Applications

What I installed immediately afterward. All of these are freely download-able applications, most of which I’ve been using for several years now.

• Firefox 3 Beta 5
• PowerPro 4.8 – shell control software
• iTunes 7.6.2
• OpenOffice 2.4
• VLC Player- all-in-one media player
• Nokia PC Suite 6.86 – interfacing with my N73
• Filezilla FTP client
• Paint.NET – midway between MSPaint and Adobe Photoshop
• Foxit Reader – lightweight alternative to Adobe Acrobat Reader
• WinRAR – archiver par excellence

The installers for all of these are now on my SanDisk 2GB USB pen drive (along with all the Thinkpad Vista drivers). I’m going to update these every six months. It’ll take me far less time to get back on my feet in the event of another crash.

The Online Life

Although I was a pretty heavy user of Web-based applications, it’s going to become a way of life now. I’m now going to move as much data as possible online (except for large files like MP3s and videos), given that I usually have access to a high-speed connection – at home, work and on my phone.

PIM – Email, Scheduling, Contacts and Notes

All my email from 2004 onwards is in my Gmail account. I forward email from my RahulGaitonde.org and IIM Kozhikode mailboxes into Gmail. I also used Gmail’s ability to import email via POP3 to pull old email from these accounts too. I had also configured Thunderbird for Gmail via IMAP, but will be using Gmail’sweb interface exclusively now. To send email from other accounts, I use Gmail’s ability to use a custom “from” address.

As an aside, does anyone know of a good Series 60 email client – with IMAP support – that I can use on my N73?

I’ve used Google Calendar extensively, right from its launch. I have three calendars – one for Work, another for Birthdays and Anniversaries and the default calendar for miscellaneous, casual events. I used to sync these calendars with Thunderbird using GCALDaemon, which I highly recommend.

Contacts is where I’ve got a problem. Outlook (and then Thunderbird) used to be my repository for contacts. Over the years, I had built up an extensive database of email addresses, phone numbers, blog URLs and work addresses, and used to sync this database with my N73. Thankfully, that syncing means my contacts are safe.

However, I’m not sure what my future setup will be. Most probably Gmail’s contacts will be my repository. But I don’t know how I’m going to sync that with my smartphone. I’d love to hear suggestions. (I hear GooSync’s paid service can do this)

Google Notebook is my trusty scrapbook. Although I don’t think much of the interface and its questionable integration with Google Bookmarks, it works well enough. I’d use it even more if it had an Offline mode (say, through Google Gears). That’d bring it close to MS Office OneNote (which is an excellent piece of work).

Finally, I use Google Bookmarks through the Google Toolbar, but ever since I’d started using the Firefox 3 Beta, my list of local bookmarks had grown – because you can now tag them and search them using the Address bar. Those recent bookmarks were lost in the crash – ironically, just days after I blogged about the need to integrate Google Bookmarks with Firefox’s local store!

Staying updated

Google Reader is the answer. Apart from friends’ blogs, I follow:

• Tech News and Opinion: GigaOM, Techcrunch, NY Times Bits, BBC’s dot.life, Startup Duniya, WATBlog, Google Blogoscoped.
• Tech Lifestyle: Lifehacker, Lenovo’s Design Matters
• News: RSS Feed for my Google News

There are several other technology bloggers whose blogs I subscribe to. For news and other non-tech material, once a fortnight, I’ll check up on the Economist and BusinessWeek.

To stay in touch with what I find interesting, visit my Google Reader Shared Items page, or subscribe to it via RSS.

Photos

Thankfully, I’ve been fairly regular uploading pictures into my Flickr Pro account. I have about 500 photos on Flickr now, tagged and categorized. In the future, Flickr will become my primary photo repository.

Blogging

RahulGaitonde.org is hosted on Wordpress 2.5 using TheWebBrains‘ hosting service. I’ve been with TWB since 2004, and they haven’t let me down.

I use Filezilla to manage files on the remote server. Here are the Wordpress plugins I use:

• Akismet for spam filtering
• FeedBurner’s FeedSmith to redirect my Wordpress RSS feed to a custom Feedburner one
• Twitter Tools for integration with my Twitter account
• Random Redirect for readers with some time on their hands
• Wordpress Database Backup
• I also have a list of my Google Reader Shared Items on my sidebar. The code for this is easily available through your Google Reader page.

Web traffic monitoring for RahulGaitonde.org is done through Google Analytics. Again, something I’ve used since it was available.

Office

I’ve always used Google Docs and Spreadsheets whenever possible, right since the Writely days. Most of term papers, plans, databases have been composed, created and stored on Google Docs – so they’ve survived the crash.

Whenever I don’t have access to the Internet, it’s always OpenOffice (although Office 2007 is a splendid piece of work, and at least three years ahead of OO.org). From now on, any document I create with OO.org will be imported into Google Docs as soon as I’m connected.

Issues

That’s the rosy bit. But what about my music collection and videos? I can either back them up on external storage (which I don’t trust right now), or on DVD (cumbersome adding files and preserving albums), or on remote bulk storage like Amazon’s S3 (bandwidth too costly in India). So large files are a problem.

What about file formats such as PDF and ZIP? Miscellaneous settings and configuration files? Right now the plan is to back them up manually, periodically, on RahulGaitonde.org. But that’s far from ideal; there are too many such files.

Finally, the volume of remote data is already so much (4+ GB in Gmail alone) that downloading all that data locally (should the need ever arise) is impractical. What if I need to move from Flickr to, say, Picasa Web Albums? Or what if I need a few dozen photos to take with me on a USB pen drive? It’s extremely cumbersome to download assorted photos, even in batch mode. It’s the same for documents, spreadsheets, notes, email.

It’s clear that making the move online is adopting a fundamentally different lifestyle – which implies moving back offline is a major task. It’s one that I’ve been driven towards by my recent massive loss of data. The move has been made easier because I was already half-way there. In the weeks to come, I’m going to cross the other half and go completely online.

Questions? Suggestions? Comments? Do let me know.

Apple released Safari 3.1 today, and has claimed that it is “the world’s fastest browser”.

“Safari loads web pages 1.9 times faster than IE 7 and 1.7 times faster than Firefox 2. Safari also runs JavaScript up to six times faster than other browsers…”

Having used  it since it was first released last year on Windows, I think this is more than just twisted statistics. Forget those measurements (down to decimal points, for god’s sake), but Safari definitely feels faster than either Firefox or Opera. Safari’s UI needs a post to itself, but it puts both IE and Firefox to shame.

Apple could put more muscle behind promoting Safari on Windows (for reasons I outlined last June), but I don’t see it giving either Firefox or IE a serious run for their money. My prediction is that Safari’ll be locked in an inconsequential battle for third place with Opera (also a fast, snappy alternative).

IE will always be number 1 because it’s pre-installed with Windows (and is un-installable). The vast majority of the installed base won’t switch to anything else (both home and business users). IE’s good enough. ‘Nuff said.

Firefox is the poster boy of the power-user crowd because it’s so customizable. But there’s an upper cap to the market share it can gain (see IE above).

Safari’s USP is speed and simplicity. Speed isn’t enough for the IE crowd to switch. And Safari’s simplicity (which implies non-extensibility) is a deal-killer for the Firefox crowd. Opera faces the exact same problems.

Between these massive masses of users, both of whom have diametrically opposite views on what a browser should be, are the miniscule 4-5% who use either of Safari or Opera, regardless of how good/fast/simple/snappy they are. Pity.

Footnote: Hark back to my June 2007 article about why Apple wants Safari on Windows – it’s got to do with the iPhone. Opera, with its large mobile push, probably has the same strategy too.

… but he doesn’t seem to have gotten things bang-on either, with regard to the supposed “closed” nature of the iPhone.

Bob Cringely contends that the battle for search is over, with Google emerging the clear winner. With Google Universal Search, Google has put so much distance between itself and numbers two and three, that the incremental return on additional investment into search by either Yahoo! or Microsoft will be negative. Both firms will be better off putting their money in other lines of business.Why has GUS ended the search wars? Apart from standard Web Search, Google’s also ruled vertical search – maps, books, images, and video. (The only exception was news, where Y! did a better job.) So if Y! and MS were to follow suit with their own integrated searches, the top video (or book) results would be on Google’s properties. In fact, the better they made their searches, the more traffic they’d drive to YouTube or books.google.com! Not only does Google do the best job with vertical search, today it also owns the properties where this vertical content resides!

So where does that leave Microsoft? Simple. Microsoft should get out of search. And out of online advertising altogether.

Surprised? Read on.

Microsoft is a company that, after having led consumer computing for a generation, is now finding itself playing follow-the-leader. Over the last few years, its strategy has been plainly, reactive. Its Live initiative (Windows Live Search, Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Messenger, Office Live) was a poor attempt to match Google’s online portfolio, pitting application service against application service. But it didn’t work out. Today, the Live initiative is an acknowledged damp squib.

Why? Because the New Web is not central to Microsoft’s business model. It never has been. In the mid-to-late nineties, when it “woke up to the Internet”, it reacted. And made Internet Explorer integral to Windows 98, added TCP/IP support and made it easy to connect to the Internet (it also bought Hotmail, launched the MSN portal and tried to play ISP). These didn’t seem to me, either then or now, to be part of a concerted strategy to leverage the opportunity the Internet presented. Cut to today. With Ray Ozzie’s “leaked” memo in 2005, the company once again found itself waking up to the New Web. Once again we find a set of ad hoc tactics that don’t collectively define a web strategy. It seemed crazy that a person with the sagacity and vision of Ozzie would talk drivel like “online advertising is the next big revenue opportunity, and therefore we must move everything – Windows, Office, Mail – online, and make money out of ads”. It is almost as if with each generation, the Web is being retrofitted into Microsoft’s business strategy.

In contrast, Google is a company that has been built from the ground up to leverage the “Internet opportunity”. The firm realised that first public, then private data would find its way to the web. It first created tools so that it would have access to all of this data (either by crawling or by hosting this content). Simultaneously, it created applications that people could use to access the information they needed from this data. And it monetized this access.

Microsoft is a desktop applications company. From 1975 to 2007, repeat, it has been a desktop applications company. Further, though it may have had a profound effect on consumer computing, its revenue has come from enterprise customers. Finally, its largest selling products are not its search service, or its MSN portal, or Hotmail, or Messenger. Its largest selling products are its Windows Operating System and Office Application Suite. The mandarins at Microsoft have to consider these facts before running around like confused chicken.

The Enterprise does not “get” the Internet. It gets the network, or, more precisely, the intranet, but it does not get the Internet. There’s just too much data that needs to be kept within the walls of the organization. Two paragraphs ago, I said that Google’s essence is to have access to data, either by crawling or hosting. No large firm is willing, either now or in the forseeable future, to let that happen. This Enterprise market has been growing for two decades now, will continue growing. This is where Microsoft faces virtually no competition from the likes of Google.

How can Microsoft enter a new phase as an enterprise software company? How can it create better applications using the Network? That’s another Tomorrow Today in itself, coming up soon after this series is done.

And Yahoo! ? The Google of the late nineties is foundering. Brad Garlinghouse’s “Peanut Butter” memo seems to have done little more than cause a rearrangement on the company’s board, but I don’t see a strategy shift in the least.

Yahoo should also get out of the search and Pay-per-click advertising space.

What is Yahoo! as a company? As Terry Semel himself stated several months ago, Yahoo! is primarily a media company that is technology-heavy. An online media company, to be precise. Now think of the online advertising world in terms of the Long Tail. Yahoo’s customers were in the “head” of the Long Tail graph – a few thousand advertisers, but each one worth big bucks. Google instead targets the “long tail” with its AdWords model. In fact, AdWords is not effective for large advertisers, but then it was never intended to be.

Yahoo! needs to realise that there is much more to the online marketing world than simply advertising, especially when compared to the sophisticated offline marketing campaigns that professional marketing and PR firms run. Yahoo! would do well to induct that kind of talent onto its rolls. I’m thinking an acquisition of a respected marketing/advertising agency. Being able to use more media like video, audio, images and maps willl increase the richness of future campaigns, With regard to video, having traffic driven to Google’s properties (YouTube) won’t seem so bad once the videos on that website have been created by Yahoo! (PR videos, video ads, videos with embedded ads, the works!)

Online PR, viral and buzz marketing, social network marketing and affiliate marketing are areas that are currently a fishmarket of small fragmented firms, none of whom have the scale or the expertise to cater to truly large clients. They’d be cannon fodder should Yahoo! choose to muscle into these spaces.

Finally, mobile is one area where I believe Yahoo! already has a lead over Google. Its widget-oriented OneSearch service proves that the mandarins at Yahoo! have the right idea. The company recognises that the mobile web is different. Although more intent-based than the PC Web, mobile web is subscription-driven instead of search-driven. OneSearch is a large step down that road. Mobile online communities could be a massive revenue-earner. Google has Orkut and Dodgeball in its armory but isn’t doing a thing with them. Will Yahoo! grab this opportunity instead?

In summary, both Yahoo! and Microsoft have forgotten their company DNA in their zeal to show Wall Street that they’re wise to every Google trick. They don’t have to be. In fact, as we’ve seen in this rather detailed Tomorrow Today, they’re three very different companies operating in three different spaces, playing to their different strengths. The sooner Redmond and Sunnyvale realise this, the sooner they’ll be able to drag these companies out of the morass they’re sliding into.

Tomorrow we’ll wind up by examining what GUS means for Google itself, and where the company could go from here.

About a week ago, Google took the lid off a project that had been brewing for several months. The company calls it Universal Search. In a nutshell, it “will blend listings from its news, video, images, local and book search engines among those it gathers from crawling web pages.”

For ordinary web searchers, the change is hardly noticeable. In fact, a lot of ordinary surfers I’ve spoken to since Google Universal Search (GUS) went live have given me the “Duh” reaction. And therein lies the genius of this innovation. This subtle, almost invisible new search is a disruptive innovation; affecting the entire SEO industry, Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google itself.

This week’s Tomorrow Today is a four-part series where we’ll examine just how GUS has changed the rules of the game for all stakeholders.

Part 1: What people are saying about GUS
Part 2: What it means for SEO
Part 3: What it means for Microsoft and Yahoo
Part 4: What it means for Google and the future.

Part 1: What people are saying about GUS

Google’s had plenty of “vertical”searches in the past – its bread-and-butter web search, image search, blog search, local search, video search, even book, map, news and email search. Google Universal search unifies these previously siloed searches. Now, a search for a term will return a list of results that span all of the above. The most dramatic change as of now seems to be the video search integration. As an example, the results to the search request ”I have a dream” will include an actual video showing Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous 1963 speech along with the usual assortment of Web links (Associated Press). Now you begin to get understand how significant this little change is, and begin to think up of other scenarios. Imagine a search for “apple store”. This could lead to (apart from normal web results), a map of Apple stores throughout the state where you’re located, new results about apple stores, images of the glass Apple Store in Soho, and so on.

The real technical smarts with converting siloed searches into GUS have to do with “finding the best answer across multiple content types“. How do you rank an image search result in comparison to a web search, or a video search result? Previously, comparing a news result for a search term with a maps result for the same term, and ranking them relative to each other was like comparing apples and oranges. No longer.

Danny Sullivan demonstrates how news, maps and book results now form part of the standard search results set. Admittedly, these results did show up on the first page of the Web search results, but they were placed separately, out of the top 10 search results. That, ironically, reduced their relevance. Consequently they were hardly clicked on.

Tomorrow we’ll see what this means for Seach Engine Optimization firms who, for good reason, are quite shaken up by this new development.

For all who go to town declaring that India has an entrepreneur-friendly, liberalized Telecom sector, here’s a dampener. TRAI’s recommendations on “ Review of Internet Services“, a report dated May 10th 2007, show just how much (or little) babus in the ministry understand the Internet. We’re light-years away from a truly liberal Telecom policy, because the DoT hasn’t even grasped the concept of creating a free, healthy market.

After having read through the report, I think I have a better understanding of what ails the DoT (and by extension, most ministries at the Center and the states). The Telecom ministry thinks it has to juggle different objectives which, in its view, are mutually incompatible. Therefore, to achieve all of these objectives, each stakeholder has to compromise to some degree. In reality, though, these objectives are _not_ incompatible, unnecessary compromised are made, and it results in a policy full of caveats, which ends up pleasing no one.

There are plenty of examples of these misplaced assumptions in the report. To demonstrate, here are a few sentences from the voluminous, bloated 126-page report, with my comments inline, in italics.

Under the “Scope of ISP license” section:

Web hosting by certain foreign companies within Indian domain who have significant market share in global market should form part of our developmental agenda and necessary policies to encourage such web hosting need to be evolved.

How in the world can “foreign companies” with “significant market share” hosting their data here going to help our “developmental agenda”?!

Strong views were expressed to permit IPTV under ambit of ISP license as it has potential to drive market, easy to provide using ISP backbone and can encourage Internet penetration .

So is this – “encouraging Internet penetration” – going to be the compass by which permission for other services will be granted in the future? What about TV on mobile phones? This is an extremely niche market, but does not in any way increase Internet penetration. Will this be allowed then?

Under the “Grey Market Operations” (?!) section:

Some entities located abroad are offering unauthorized Internet telephony services in our country for making calls to and from abroad on Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) and Public Land Mobile Network (PLMN) ….The licensing, legal and technological issues arising from such services need to be urgently addressed by DoT.

Some companies are also providing Software through their websites that enables the user to have free chat with anyone using the similar software anywhere in the world while logged on to the server of such service providers. Software can be downloaded free of charge from their website.

The Internet telephony call through such unregistered entities using PCs/IP access devices in India to landline or mobile phones abroad and vice versa result in a revenue loss to the government . Such calls can escape the eyes of law enforcement agencies also.

Here is a classic case of the DoT’s misplaced priorities. Is the objective of TRAI to “increase Internet penetration” and ensure that the Indian consumer gets the best and cheapest service, or is it to ensure that the Government – comprising the DoT, BSNL and MTNL – earn the maximum possible revenue? The DoT’s most glaring – even criminal – policy failure is to disallow such an interconnect. If the DoT has to stifle innovation and consumer benefit in favor of PSU revenues, we must then question the very reason for the existence of these PSUs. Indeed, in an article I wrote back in December 2005,

If the state is not running telecom companies for “social service”, or it put it more correctly, “social benefit”, then what are they running it for? If profit is the only motive, then the company should be privatized, fully, and right away. Think about it: If there is no “larger good” for running BSNL and MTNL, their motives are just like any other private company. Why, then, should they be at such a huge advantage compared to a private player?

By escaping regulatory levies such unlicensed foreign entities are able to provide cheaper services to lure the subscribers. The Authority is aware that large number of Indians are availing such services. Stopping access to such services is technically difficult. There is serious revenue implication for the government. DoT may address this development on priority. One of the possible options could be to ask such companies to register in India, seek permission from DoT and host their website in India.

Again, the ridiculous premise that “hosting their website in India” is going to guarantee compliance! Besides, why should “cheap services” have such negative connotations as to invite use of the term “lure the subscribers”? And yes, the issue of “serious revenue implication for the Government” raises its ugly head again.

Under the “Revamping and Restructuring of Internet Services” section:

It is extremely important to regularly analyse the business data of the operational ISPs to ensure that the licensed ISPs are contributing to the growth of Internet and engage in legitimate business.

What is “legitimate” and “illegitimate” business? What “business data” will help identify such legitimacy? Should ISPs contribute to the “growth of Internet”? What if an ISP grows in an area only by managing to convert users of competing ISPs to its services? It has been a resounding success, but has not resulted in a single extra subscriber. Is that legal or illegal?

The Authority therefore favours a uniform FDI cap /equity of 74% across all telecom licenses. ISPs who have more than 74% FDI cap /equity at present shall be required to bring down their FDI cap/ equity to 74% within two years.

What is the magic number of 74% supposed to signify? Why not 65%? Why not 84%? As long as the foreign entity has a controlling stake in a firm, any additional restrictions on its holding are meaningless. If 50% FDI is allowed, why not 100%? In fact, what is any restriction at all on FDI going to achieve in a field like telecom?

Annexure II – Recommendations of “stakeholders”:

Stakeholders also felt that the ISP licensing should only be linked with the vanilla bandwidth provisioning whereas all other services based on video & voice applications, www-hosted applications should be freed from licensing. It was also stressed upon that in a multi-tasking, multi-function, convergent nature of Internet; it would be illogical to consider regulating isolated applications.

Ah. Finally something which makes sense. But…

However, it does not appear possible to expand the scope of ISP license to cover all services as it will infringe on the rights granted to ILD/NLD/ Access Providers. Therefore, for the ISPs to move up the value chain, there is no option but to obtain one or more licenses as per the services planned to be offered by them.

There – senseless restrictions again. The same issues with interfacing with PSTN that we dealt with earlier.

Stakeholder commented that since Skype / Google type service providers are not licensed to provide such services in India without having facility for lawful interception, therefore, the vigilance and monitoring efforts are required to be beefed up, as these applications not only bypass the laws and regulations of the land, but also pose a threat to security. As such these services should be blocked.

I have nothing to comment on this, except that I would dearly like to know who this particular “stakeholder” is, and that I’d like to hear his views on how Google Talk poses a “threat to security”.

Finally, the US has the most liberal laws I’ve seen:

In US, ISPs do not require license or authorization. Instead, e-mail, data and Internet services are treated as “information services,” and ISPs are permitted to operate unfettered in a competitive and free market, subject only, with a few limited exceptions, to general business laws.

Ah, this is an entrepreneur-friendly policy. Here is a Government that believes in leaving anyone who wishes to offer services “operate unfettered”, and step back from the scene, as opposed to one that gets involved in grand-scale centralized planning to the extent of mandating the “target for broadband users in India” in a particular year!

There was a time when Google released its Desktop Search application (since renamed Google Desktop), and the Google Talk client more or less together. Back then, I wondered why Google was going down the path of Windows desktop applications – wasn’t the Web the Future, according to them? I did think that their strategy implementation was faltering just a bit.

In any case, this month we’ve seen an example of what the next generation of web applications is going to look like. Google Talk is no longer an “application”, but a Flash “gadget” that can live anywhere on the web – be it on your personalized Google homepage, or your blog, or your Firefox sidebar. Well, a web-based chat application is rather stale – computer science undergrads routinely write applications like these as part of their network programming course. But the Talk Gadget’s different – in two significant ways:

One, it’s got about all the functionality of a desktop application. Because it’s Flash-based (as opposed to HTML/AJAX), it’s able to incorporate features like tabbed chats, Flickr/Picasa slideshows, or embedded YouTube videos.

Two, it can be “deployed” anywhere on the web, as I mentioned earlier. This has far-reaching consequences for web application developers; the Talk Gadget represents the beginning of the era of full-featured application components, an era where you no longer have to download/launch/upgrade applications, or even live with browser-based implementations. We’ve set foot into the realm of “instant launch”. Take a look at the Google Talk page if you don’t get what I just said. The big blue button no longer says “Download Google Talk” – just “Launch Google Talk”.

I guess we can see where we’re going – “launch Word/Excel/PowerPoint” anytime, anywhere, for starters. Componentization of full-featured applications like this could lead to completely new ways of looking at existing web applications. Take Blogger. Today, the publisher and the reader have very different interfaces to the blog – the publisher uses the Blogger interface to compose, manage and publish posts, and the user views the *.blogspot.com pages. With Word processor integration, we could have a collapsible compose window right at the top, viewable only by the publisher. He/she could compose/manage posts right from the existing *.blogspot.com page. And what is a comments system but a multi-way chat? Enter the embedded Google Talk Gadget. Adding images is no longer cumbersome – simply drag and drop from your desktop (or browser window) into the compose area, and it’s automatically uploaded or linked. Let your imagination loose for email and scheduling applications too. Now embed AdSense into these components, and you can see where the money’s coming from.

Finally, the most promising platform to deliver these applications seems to be Flash. Suddenly, Adobe has been given a new lease of life. Will Google risk building its future application services on a platform owned by another company? And where does Adobe go from here? (Think Apollo.) That’s fodder for another post!

Any good affiliate marketer hits the Long Tail Dilemma of publishers fairly quickly. On the one hand are large publishers with lots of eyeballs which could get the merchant huge volumes of highly focused audiences. For instance, an India-centric Moto-enthusiast website such as http://www.xbhp.com/ would make a fantastic publisher for a motorcycle company such as Royal Enfield. These form the “head” of your publisher base – they number a few, but bring in substantial sale volumes individually. As an affiliate program manager, you will work with each individual large publisher to best position your merchant’s offerings on their web “real estate”.

Here’s where you get real innovation, where magic with data feeds can be wrought, where true integration with content is possible.However, affiliate program managers are also acutely aware that there’s tons of data being generated every single day on the web – and that every website, blog, service that comes online is more web real estate, and every new user is a potential affiliate. These form the “tail” of your publisher base. For an affiliate program to really scale (and scale tremendously), it must ride the wave of this data. As a program manager, you won’t chase and cut deals with each individual fish that jumps into the web pool. Today, you rely on publisher registrations on CJ, Shareasale, Linkshare and that minnow in the news lately, Performics. As the read-write web gathers mass, the tail is growing inexorably larger in comparison to the head.

The Dilemma, then, is this: you can’t offer the tail as much as you can offer the head. And reciprocally, the tail can’t perform acrobatics with your creatives and data feeds either. All your tail does today is slap banner or text ads on their blogs or home pages. That’s about the limit of adoption. Where’s the differentiation? Not only for your merchant, but also for you, the affiliate program manager? What value are you adding? If the only interaction with the tail is going to be making animated GIFs and catchy text ads, writing up a “Join our Affiliate Program” page on the merchant’s website, and registering on CJ et al (and waiting for the tail to sign up), the merchant will soon realize that the middleman isn’t adding any value, and will cut you out. He’d much rather do it himself.

What we’re seeing is the commoditization of the process of traditional affiliate marketing. The guys who’ll make the real bucks in the future are going to be those who’ll put easy-to-use tools in the hands of the tail. Or even better, make tools for affiliates that auto-deploy themselves. Who bring in the innovation that belongs in the head today into the tail. Amazon began the process way back with aStore, but that isn’t going far enough.

Hold it. Auto-deploy? Doesn’t that sound like Search Engine Marketing? Well, it does, in a way. From the publisher’s point of view, what’s the essential difference between AdSense and Affiliate marketing? With AdSense, the publisher has no control over what ads will be displayed in the AdSense code box that he/she slaps on his/her page, merely that they’ll be more or less relevant to the page content. With Affiliate marketing, the publisher chooses from a clutch of creatives provided by a merchant. Once you talk about auto-deploying merchant creatives in innovative, “head-like” ways, the line between them gets blurred. Several startups have caught on already. This comment on Sam Harrelson’s blog lists a few of the more interesting ones.

We’re at a fairly interesting juncture in the Affiliate Marketing market. The next big opportunity belongs to whoever will have the gumption to target the Long Tail, and do it in a way that goes far beyond the tired, banal banner-text-ad process that’s been perfected into a science.

One of the more interesting applications of Google Trends is to compare the search volumes of two or more search terms over the past several months (or years). So we were winding down work yesterday at Convonix, and fooling around with Google trends, when, on a whim, I compared “valentine” and “lingerie”. And well – there is a correlation. See for yourself.

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