AOL just will not be a serious competitor to Google, Yahoo or Microsoft

Reading Dylan Fuller’s post on AOL CEO, Andy Fulco, talking tough:

“I hope they beat each other’s brains out over search and leave the display market to us,” he said to the Interactive Advertising Bureau annual conference. “I think it’s a mistake. But I think Napoleon said never interrupt your enemy when they’re in the middle of making a mistake.”

Dylan is right there are some cool products being talked about. But this is how to lose users.. go along to the Xdrive website and click the link for more info about their new ultra cool Xdrive Desktop Lite app - a 404 error.

So I download it instead.

I already have an account.. I can log in via the website just fine - but I just get a login error via the Xdrive Lite app. I know it is in beta still but surely they can do better than this?

AOL are lucky Google’s Gdrive is not out yet and Microsoft’s version (Skydrive) is currently unusable - you have to select individual files to upload to their online storage - thats great when I have a few thousand files.

[update] ah - they fixed the link now and updated the front page design entirely - much better, there is also no advert either on the front page interestingly. For me though, the product still just doesn’t seem to work as advertised. I selected a directory and dragged it to the app. It should sync right? Well the list of transfers shows all the files but after it syncs some files, it just seems to get stuck - files are no longer being uploaded. I don’t know why.. some form of error message of status bar would be useful! Incidentally this was the same issue 4 months ago when I last tried Xdrive

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I noticed something interesting the other day - Microsoft released the new Vista service pack early to everybody when they only intended to release it to a small group for testing.

What’s interesting is that Microsoft released the service pack to manufacturing (RTM) back on 4th Feb, yet this seemed to happen on 21st Feb. This means that even post RTM, Microsoft is working on (and making changes to?) SP1 - I didn’t think changes were made to RTM - looks like I was wrong.

A rapid fire post on the past week having been away from it all in Atlanta.

FAST is being bought by Microsoft - Dylan Fuller, formerly of FAST has a good run down on it. I do think it is interesting that Microsoft bought it rather than Google - it’s an obvious fit for Microsoft in the enterprise search space where it is strong but I thought Google wanted more of this space - is it that they think they can do it themselves? or does it not fit with their “everything in the cloud” philosophy?

Xobni launched its beta. Scott Voigt saved me the trouble of installing it right now by giving me a preview. It looks nice enough and gives you some interesting information about your inbox but it doesn’t aid your productivity. It will be interesting to see if this can evolve into a “Email 2.0″ plugin for Outlook, creating a social network through which it prioritises your email. Very early days right now though.

CES happened, the only highlights I heard about were Yahoo Life (integration of the various Yahoo services to give a better user experience - more in a later post); great looking TVs (very thin, bigger..) and Bill Gate’s disappointing keynote looking more at what we know Microsoft is doing rather than anything new. Still it was his last one..

Finally.. Newsgator went free. Finally. The question is whether it is too little too late for them.

It is not so long ago that your internet experience went something like this:

1. Connect to Internet
2. Check your webmail account
3. Check your favourite sites
4. Go to Google to search for something

Then came RSS/webfeeds which allowed you to centralise most of the above into a single page - your personalised home page. There are plenty of options - iGoogle, Microsoft Live.com, My Yahoo and Netvibes (which I use) to name a few.

This was supposed to be the page that became your first port of call and Google has been leading the way.

..except something has happened to divert people away from it.

Facebook

How did this happen? Well actually most people online never really got to that second stage of using a personalised homepage. It was just a bit too geeky and difficult to use. It still is. Instead they joined Facebook in the millions and stored all their info there.

I keep hearing stories of teenagers who say that they use Facebook to message their friends and only "oldies" use email. Photos are stored on there; quick updates (a la Twitter) are submitted there and now you can even play games and chat in there.

So it’s fast becoming a user’s first point of call, integrating your life offline - online. As many have pointed out, it contains a significant amount of info about your life. This has rapidly pushed privacy to the fore.

So where is the threat to Google? Well Google survives by scavenging off the information you leave behind when using its products. So if you are no longer using its products then there’s a problem.

What if Facebook added a search bar for the web into its platform. Since you are there already will you use it? I think that’s only likely if its good enough.. but Yahoo and possibly Microsoft Search isn’t that much behind Google in terms of quality - it’s just habit that keeps Google where it is.

Or Facebook added:

a decent calendar service..

..or a decent email platform

If they can do it well enough.. those teenagers will be shifting away from Google to.. yes you guessed it.. Facebook’s platform.

What would be more interesting would be if Facebook opened up its messaging platform - allowed 3rd party providers to provide the solutions. Oh its doing that already.. but not enough.

Imagine - your preferred calendar/email/search service all embedded in to your Facebook page. Facebook becomes the glue that connects everything together.

First they need to get the privacy right though..

[update] Just read that Facebook signed a deal with Microsoft to place Microsoft adCenter sponsored links and other ads on Facebook and that now there is talk that Microsoft is possibly looking at a £150m-£250m investment in exchange for 5% of the company. That values Facebook at a cool £5bn. More importantly, it would place Microsoft in a stronger position for access to Facebook’s userbase.

I can’t believe the figures being bandied about for the sale of Doubleclick.. even the initial figure of a $2bn bid by Microsoft sounded high. Now supposedly there is a $2.6bn bid by Google.

I can see the reasons for either party buying Doubleclick - Microsoft is losing the battle to Google in the advertising space and it will complement their offering. Google is already in this space so not sure if there is a benefit for them other than stopping Microsoft?

It would certainly be great for Hellman & Friedman who bought Doubleclick for $1.1bn only 2 years ago.

But there have been several acquisitions by Doubleclick recently (Falk, Tangozebra, Klipmart) so there are multiple ad tracking systems inside the company - I guess there must be some form of consolidation going on internally? Seems to me to be a difficult time to be buying Doubleclick at an expensive price when you look at their turnover. Maybe Atlas is a cheaper alternative? Though even they have just bought Accipiter.