Shopping time for biggies, Google bought Picasa, Urchin….eBay got Skype, Yahoo…Flickr and recently del.icio.us
But apart from all these I must say, Yahoo is the smartest…why? because they are carefully shopping for the stuff and buying what people like and what can be improved a lot….
When I read news about Yahoo’s del.icio.us purchase, I was quite happy because this will make a good site much better and the growth will be much faster than earlier…and apart from that it makes people lot more happy because these sites are actively used by many people around the world and after big purchase lot of exciting things can happen..(like we saw with Flickr)
Where in the case of Google, I would say it was a bad deal…I don’t think there are many people who are Picasa followers or say Urchin lovers…I personally feel urchin or sucks…awstats is much better than urchin in many ways…In fact these 2 software never excites me to use them and try them out…yes I had tried Google Analytics but it didn’t make me a happy user
Now eBay…yeah..skype was a great purchase but I somehow feel that..someone will buy out eBay soon….
So I would call Yahoo a smart buyer and picking the good ones from the list…(Hint Hint Hint…Yahoo!! Don’t let Google buy Riya 😉 )
It is not bel.icio.us but it is del.icio.us 🙂
fixed 😉
well, I wouldn’t say Google ain’t a smart shopper. From what I’ve heard about Picasa(I’ve never used it myself), its a great software & from what I gather it has its own following.
Then as for Urchin, you simply don’t know how people who have it adore it & who don’t have it crave for it but the price tag was what keeping them at bay. Now they’ve offered it for free, people just signed up for it which incidently overwhelmed the Google servers!! But as per what I gather, the people advertising using AdWords are pretty much happy(I’d know, our company is one of the advertisers & my CTO is happy) given the fact that Google Analytics integrates well with AdWords, giving stats on conversion & tracking & whole ball of wax!!
Also, the other thing is that if Google weren’t smart, they wouldn’t be riding the stock-market stallion at $400/share. Urchin would also benefit them a lot since they are number crunchers & Urchin would allow them access to more numbers & stats to crunch, after all, knowledge is power!!
Eventually, all these jocks are smart shoppers, if they weren’t, they wouldn’t have millions & billions to buy something. So neither Google nor eBay are idiots as far as their purchases are concerned, & Yahoo! I believe has already been tagged as a smart buyer by you!! 🙂
Yahoo! and Google are taking the easy way out.Instead of making new softwares and services they are acquiring already established companies.
hmm…I had urchin on my 1st server, I purposely asked DC guys not to install it on the new server…it was pain the a**..it used to create too many log files and used to fill user acocunts with the log files…
2nd thing, If i am not wrong the outcome of urchin (stats) is same as awstats…which is free and gives very good stats..
3rd About adwords tracking…yes I agree it must be very helpful for the ones who have adwords tracking but how many? I am here talking about the masses….
Google had to stop signups coz there was as a free tag atatched and apart from that it was GOOGLE who was providing it…so obviously there will be lot of excitement..even I was excited to try it out but was not quite happy with the output….
Now by saying Yahoo smart buyer I do not mean that others are dumb..they are obviosuly smart enough but the money that Flickr will generate that Picasa wont 🙂 so thats where Yahoo rules…
25$ a flckr pro account…who would not like to purchase it? Even I am gonna get it in 2 days…so if it was Urchin at even 10$ then no one would have got it 🙂 i.e. very few people would have purchased it compared to Flickr..
cheers
Deep
yeah, well, I heard people say that Urchin displays nice reports and all which other stat programs don’t. I dunno, haven’t used Urchin, I just use Webalizer & Awstats!! 😉
yeah well, you are right there!! I got it last week!! 🙂
These are smart buys, as of now. But in this web world it doesn’t take time to make a dupicate of existing technology.
Remember the craze of Million Dollar Home Page. The news got covered in HT Style front page also. But it didn’t take time to make a script to do the same task in I guess less than 20 days at a price of 50$ when the space of 20*20 pixel was 100$.
So the point is predicting these buys as smart in future , by future I mean 2-3 years is pointless. Some new technology craze will exist then. Instead these companies should capitalize on today and make best out of it.
And by the way Riya :wink:, I hope Google gets it.. go Google go…
ur analysis of the buying decisions of the net biggies is fully correct. thanx for making us think about this…
ya true, yahoo has been the smartest so far.
awstats and google analytics produces similar reports. but the interface of google analytics is much more appealing to the eyes. it also tells the visitors are which state of which country. awstats giv only country name. anyway, i am happy wid awstats. google analytics is slow… i cant see current reports, old reports r shown.
once i installed picasa but then quickly uninstalled it.
I wouldn’t call all these companies smart shoppers. They shop just to create a market flutter (most of the times), and very rarely, if ever, has a purchase actually helped the share price of any company. In the case of Yahoo!, however, they know they are extremely good at developing competing services themselves, but go for the buy-out just to get the market share.
Google is also buying companies based on the incorporation of new technology to their offerings, but in doing so, they are not actually increasing their user base. But then, they are Google and don’t need to worry about users, right? I think they’re slowly losing ground. None of the newer products coming out of Google are truly great or innovative.