Innovation, the New Competitive Landscape

Google has been leading the charge of on line innovation as of late with the release of Gmail, Google Local and Google Maps. Their focus is on building what we call usable applications with a focus on the innovative use of technology, not just for sake of making "cool things" (aren't we all tired of that), but actually fulfilling real needs.

Now Yahoo is moving away from leaning solely on their brand strength and moving towards providing usable, needed solutions to their customers and search users. They recently released a beta product called Yahoo! Mindset.

Yahoo! Mindset has been tagged (by Yahoo!) as an "intent driven search." It allows you to search for a term and then adjust what the intent of your search was by moving a slider, left to right, to indicate that you are interested in search results focused on shopping or research. The closer you move the slider to the "shopping" side, the more commercially focused the results become and likewise, the closer you move the slider to the "research" side the more research-oriented the results become.

I'm not going to spend a lot of energy commenting on the implementation or the technology used to perform these adjustments, although they are quite useful in creating usable apps and minimizing the need for round trips to the web server, thus potentially improving the user's experience. What I do want to comment on is the fact that Yahoo! is developing apps that are driven by their consumer's needs and they've decided to attempt to innovate to provide solutions for these needs. If they don't they will continue to lose the innovation game and market share to Google.

This applies to our SME customers as well. Innovation is going to play a key role in staying competitive and gaining advantage in crowded marketplaces. We have our own research projects in development and testing now as well that will allow us to provide clients with more usable applications and better user experiences giving them competitive advantages.

Gone are the days of making "cool things" (death to Flash splash page, good riddance and RIP), we welcome, embrace and are already leveraging innovation in web technologies to help your clients grow.