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Purple Cow
Why did Yahoo! defeat AltaVista, Lycos, and Infoseek
in the race to become the center of the Internet And how
did Yahoo! forget that lesson and let Google do it again
In each case, Yahoo! and Google had the same things
going for them. Unbelievably simple interface (for the
first few years of Google, there were only two buttons – and
one of them was “I feel lucky”). Fast loading. No decisions.
When people asked someone else where to go to get what
they needed online, the recommendation was simple.
Here’s a great Google story I heard from Mark Hurst: It
turns out that the folks at Google are obsessed with the
email they get criticizing the service. They take it very seriously.
One person writes in every once in a while, and he
never signs his name. According to Marissa Meyer at
Google, “Every time he writes, the e-mail contains only a
two-digit number. It took us awhile to figure out what he
was doing. Turns out he’s counting the number of words
on the home page. When the number goes up, like up to
52, it gets him irritated, and he e-mails us the new word
count. As crazy as it sounds, his e-mails are helpful,
because it has put an interesting discipline on the UI
team, so as not to introduce too many links. It’s like a scale
that tells you that you’ve gained two pounds.” (Yahoo! has
more than five hundred words on their home page now.)
A long time ago, Hertz and Avis grew their brands with
TV and print advertising. Today, it’s too late for their
competitors to catch up using the same technique. So
National and Alamo struggle. Enterprise Rental Car,
though, has an entirely different strategy. They’re not at
the airport and they don’t cater to business travelers.
Instead, they created a new Purple Cow – they’ll pick you
up with a rental car when your regular car is in the shop or
totaled in an accident.
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