Chapter 50 Chapter 4 Ji Shengyu He Shengliang

Without Google, Yahoo is almost certain to dominate the Internet today, and even in search, it may be the king.It's a pity that Yahoo was born at a bad time. Just when it was recovering from the shadow of the Internet bubble collapse, it encountered Google, the most powerful opponent in the IT industry today.Once upon a time, Yahoo had dominated the Internet and successfully resisted Microsoft's attack, and Google was just a small company with a few people.However, the size of the company cannot fully guarantee the outcome of future competition; the company's genes play a more important role.

Yahoo is different from all the companies we introduced earlier, from AT&T to Cisco. Those companies are all technology leaders in the industry, and Yahoo has never been.We still don't know one of Yahoo's important inventions.Yahoo has been providing web search services since its birth, but until it acquired Inktomi in 2003, Yahoo itself has never done search, although many people use its search service.Behind the Yahoo search was Inktomi's search engine, which was changed to Google's in 2000-2004.Yahoo favors the manual editorial work of traditional media over the automatic processing of information by computers.As early as 1999, I discussed with Yahoo people to use computers to automatically classify texts to establish Yahoo's directory system, but the answer I got was that Yahoo had tried some automatic methods and found that there were always some wrongly classified web pages, so I insisted on Manually categorize thousands of websites.This is completely different from the attitude of a technology company. A technology company, whether it is AT&T in the past or Google now, will use technology instead of manual work to solve problems as much as possible. Of course, all technologies have their own limitations and shortcomings. A The attitude of tech-savvy companies is to solve these problems rather than regress to manual operations.So far, Yahoo still manually adjusts the search results, unlike Google, which uses computers to rank completely.

Samuel saw Yahoo's technical flaws and tried to reshape it into a technology company, but it was easier said than done.It is even more difficult for it to compete with Google, the most dynamic technology company today. Google's emphasis on technology is obvious to all.Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, academicians of the National Academy of Engineering, and Brin, another founder of Google, are technical experts themselves.At Google, the status of engineers is very high, and the highest-level programmers can enjoy the treatment of global vice presidents. This is not only impossible in Yahoo, but also few companies in the world can do it.There is no company in the world that does not emphasize the importance of technology, but some companies talk about it, and only a few companies implement it. Google is obviously the latter.As a technician, whether he is willing to do his best for his company depends to a large extent on whether he is valued.On the one hand, the importance is reflected in income, and on the other hand, it is reflected in how much say he has in the company.Of course, a company's overall right to speak is a constant. If the technical department has a greater right to speak, some departments must have no right to speak.In many traditional companies, including Yahoo, relatively speaking, the marketing department and the product department have a greater say, while the engineering department has a smaller say.Google is doing the opposite.In order to improve the work efficiency of engineers, Google is very thoughtful about many small things. For example, each engineer at Google can get two brand new 24-inch LCD monitors and a high-performance host, plus a latest laptop.And when a friend of mine joined Yahoo a year ago, he was assigned an old-fashioned monitor with a flickering screen, and his work efficiency dropped a lot.When we introduced Microsoft and Intel earlier, we saw an example of turning a commercial advantage into a technological advantage, and Google's victory over Yahoo is an example of turning a technological advantage into a commercial advantage.

Originally, Yahoo had its own strengths. It had the largest user base in the world, and its content was very good. It could be said to be the New York Times and Wall Street Journal in terms of Internet media.Because of these two points, many large companies in the world's top 500 are willing to place brand advertisements on Yahoo's web pages.This advantage is unmatched by any website including Google.As we mentioned earlier, there is an unwritten rule in the advertising industry that first-class brands must advertise on the corresponding media.For example, Coca-Cola will always find the best media to advertise to show that it is the number one brand in the beverage industry.And Google's strength is advertising in search results, which is aimed at small and medium-sized businesses, and there is no conflict with Yahoo's initial market.Originally, Yahoo’s market was much larger than Google’s, because brand advertising dominated the advertising industry, and companies like Procter & Gamble and Johnson & Johnson spent nearly tens of billions of dollars a year to build the brands of their various products.For example, Procter & Gamble has created hundreds of famous brands, including the well-known Head & Shoulders, Pantene, Tide laundry detergent, Gillette, Olay, Crest toothpaste and Oral-B toothbrush, etc. Products, such as crocodile (LACOSTE), Hugo, Boss and Escada, etc.It is certainly not appropriate for companies such as Johnson & Johnson to create these brands, and to maintain these famous brands depends on constantly spending money on advertising in first-class media.Therefore, the cake of brand advertising is enough to be eaten by Yahoo. It can completely avoid Google, and even form an alliance with Google to jointly develop the Internet market.But Samuel did not choose to make the cake bigger, but provoked unnecessary and hopeless competition, making it difficult for Yahoo to return to the basic market now.

The technical competition between the two companies, in addition to the human competition, is the competition of execution. Because of Google's loose working environment, it is very appetizing to technical personnel, which not only makes it have an incomparable advantage in the battle for talents, but also makes it more efficient than similar companies.The improvement of efficiency in large companies is not as simple as providing some free lunches. First of all, they must be able to break through the mountains, break the boundaries of departments, and coordinate and cooperate. On the one hand, Google is the place with the highest concentration of PhDs per unit area in the world. It has an incomparable talent advantage over Yahoo. The scientific research and development department itself is one.Yahoo spent a lot of effort to build a research department, but adopted the separation of scientific research and development from Bell Labs in the past.Sometimes researchers can't even get real data from the product department for experiments.

Jerry Yang, the leader of Yahoo, is undoubtedly a wizard in the Internet field. To some extent, he created the entire Internet industry.But Page and Brin are two geniuses both in business and technology, and in just a few years, Google has come from behind to become the king of the Internet.The figure below is a comparison of the performance of the two companies since 2000 (in millions of dollars). Google's turnover and profits were originally only a fraction of Yahoo's, but it grew at an unprecedented rate, and by 2006 it had left Yahoo far behind. The IT field is a win-take-all world. In 2007, the gap between the two companies continued to widen.