Google vs MS (Was Re: [Ilugc] Google vs Yahoo, again!)
- From: suraj@xxxxxxxxx (Suraj Kumar)
- Date: Wed Jul 2 13:54:21 2008
On Tue, Jul 1, 2008 at 8:08 PM, Venkatraman S <venkat83@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I do not consider Y! here - am always confused whether they are a media
company or a tech company! btw...i happen to know of an instance wherein in
one of the Y! interviews(for their search team) - the interviewer ended up
asking the interviewee about the fields in the RSS feed :P and asked how the
individual fields that can be stored in a MySQL table.
I'll try to not look like I'm speaking as a Yahoo! employee here :)
Instead, I shall merely try to explain why the notion of 'monopoly' is
a common running thread across all stock-market driven companies such
as Google or Yahoo! or Microsoft. I'll try and elaborate why its not
really in the companies hands to be pure of heart given the conficting
drive to make profits. and interestingly, even a seemingly altrusitic
thing such as releasing "really cool" FOSS tool. The motive is the
same. The approach, different.
You gotta understand one thing: End of the day, both Yahoo! and Google
are companies into which the market has invested money and they need
to make 'profits' against the money invested. Don't make profits,
nobody wants to invest in you. Emotional affectives such as freedom to
the world do always take a back seat because the investors don't shake
a leg about such affectives. Doesn't matter whether its a Google or a
Microsoft or a Yahoo!. What differs amongst these is how they intend
to make the money. However, there is clearly nothing different in
what they all want to do: to gain an exclusive market space and keep
making money in such a way that its difficult for competitors to take
away your market share.
Microsoft's strategies has been the three Es (Embrace, Extend,
Extinguish (see wikipedia for details)). Google's strategy has been to
provide a free-value network to people while making that a marketplace
for advertisers to show their ads. Yahoo! had created a marketplace
for itself by making itself the number one destination on the internet
(yes, even today, Yahoo.com is the most visited website on the
planet). People (especially those of the US) visit Yahoo! because
that's where their tidbits of their daily lives come from - Mail,
News, Photos, bookmarks, media sharing and so on. Yahoo! had
traditionally been making money pretty well by displaying
advertisements on these 'destinations'. We all know about how
advertising drives up sales and so on. While traditional advertising
is all about registering a brand in the observer's mind, a significant
portion of advertising is also to find out the user's intent. While
each Yahoo! destination went the way of mining the user's data and
using it to deliver relevant ads, Google's strategy was quite
different - they ended up asking the user to provide his intention
into a search box. That's where, things took a big turn in how the
internet advertising industry evolved. Soon advertisers saw the great
potential of search based advertising and Google became a one-hit
wonder.
So, its all about the advertisements in the end. Google does it by
some ways. Yahoo! uses some other... and there are lot of overlaps
between the two too. Now, both have figured, being destinations isn't
the way they are going to grow further and that being good with
interoperability is the way to go. Google allows folks to access their
data through APIs. Yahoo! also has APIs to a lot of it's services
(del.icio.us, flickr, maps... and I'm sure you heard about Search
Monkey :) ). Besides APIs, I can say with certainity, amongst google
and Yahoo!, Yahoo! has released quite a lot of pretty interesting open
source software. The first that comes to my mind is Hadoop and all the
work around hadoop (pig, etc.,.)... and for the common netizen, YUI,
Yahoo!'s contributions to mysql and even the FreeBSD project. Compare
this to the 'funding' by Google to the Mozilla project. IMO, it is
merely a distribution 'deal' (ie.,. to have google as the default
search engine) than a funding per-se. You see, I'm not saying Google
is evil. I'm saying, even if google's pure-hearted intention was to
fund the Mozilla project, they wouldn't have been able to do it
without explaining to their investors why they want to give away that
money. Becoming the default search engine on Mozilla is their answer
to the investors.
Finally, I'd like to throw some perspective about the 'question' you
were asked in your interview. Before I joined Yahoo!, I worked for an
embedded systems company. The challenges there are quite different:
It's about being memory efficient and the data one deals with is
typically small. For instance, one of my interview questions was to
write a program to extract common words between two files. My initial
answer was a technically working answer. But the moment my interviewer
asked me "What if there were a million words in both the files?", I
had to rethink my program because now we are talking a completely
different scale and the problem has morphed into a new one. Its not
about 'finding' the intersection, but about finding it effectively
given the large scale.
Extracting and storing an RSS feed into a database is a very similar
question too. It has quite a few elements that can be optimised and
they were just testing your design, data structure and approach, IMO.
Imagine, you have a billion RSS feeds to process, wouldn't you have to
think differently about how you'll do trivial things such as sorting
or defining your database schema? Would you even be able to run a
single database instance? ... and how are you going to be
fault-tolerant?
Cheers,
-Suraj
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