The World Wide Web has over the past two years has gone thought some quite interesting changes. Recently I was thinking back to 1996 when Yahoo! ruled the roost, and how much things have changed since then. The fact that Yahoo! didn t buy Google when they had the change is often regarded as one of the biggest mistakes in business. Saying that is a little unfair, Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted around the four billion dollar mark for Google at the time. This was almost all of Yahoo! s market worth. So the purchase would have turned into a merger.
Google continued to develop their search engine, hitting upon a great idea in the process. People just wanted a quick loading page where they can get to the content they want. They were only doing the same thing Yahoo! was. But buy doing it better Google made a killing, and there are now talks of Google buying Yahoo!
Skip forward to the mid 2000 s MySpace make a massive killing with their immensely popular MySpace dot com. People thought this was the future of the web. Not just that but the World Wide Web rebooted. Web 2.0. No longer did companies have to provide interesting data and information for their users. They made the users buy into creating their own content. The premise was this, make a service, sign up some people, and sit in a comfy chair and watch the money roll in.
At the time any competitor to MySpace had a mountain to climb. MySpace dot com was getting one million new users a day. Soon the whole world would be signed up. One competitor took up the challenge. And who would have thought that the plucky FaceBook would become the giant they now are. The way FaceBook made there mark was by doing practically the same thing as MySpace. While Tom was counting his money, and looking smug, FaceBook were advancing the technology. The FaceBook team were trying exciting things with AJAX and Java script, not only trying them, but getting them to work. And work well.
It almost seemed like it was over night that FaceBook had the same success as Google, toppling the giant of MySpace. FaceBook succeeded by doing what MySpace did. But doing it better.
These two examples have always led me to believe that you can get to the top even by copying someone. Apple and Microsoft, probably two of the biggest and most easily recognised companies in the world, have been doing this for years. From Microsoft with MSDOS to Apple copying the mouse off Xerox.
In summary however, you have to keep in mind, that if you are at the top, you ve got to be watching your back. Don t sit there like MySpace did, get to the top, and then make it better. That s how Microsoft have done it. That s how Google have done it.
Who knows, Google may look streets ahead of anyone, so far ingrained into our culture we have phrases like I ll Google it but just because there good, doesn t mean you can do it better.
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