Number 13 in the Biggest Technology Goof List
February 22, 2009
ComputerWorld published on February 22, 2008, here a list of the “The 25 Greatest Blunders in Tech History.” I find these lists amusing. I paddled right by the first 12 and the last 12. I focused on blunder number 13:
Search portals. Where are they now? At the height of the dot-com boom, web surfers had a plethora of search engines to choose from: AltaVista, Excite, InfoSeek, Lycos, and many more. Today, the major players of the past are mostly dead. A few have soldiered on, such as Ask.com, but only after repeated redesigns. Chalk it up to old-fashioned hubris. Instead of concentrating on their search offerings, the first-generation search engines fell victim to the portal arms race. They built up dashboards full of sports scores, stock quotes, news headlines, horoscopes, the weather, email, instant messaging, games, and sponsored content – until finding what you wanted was like playing Where’s Waldo. Neither fish nor fowl, they became awkward combinations of search portals and general-interest portals. The world went to Yahoo for the latter. And when an upstart called Google appeared with a clean UI and high-quality search, users told the other engines to get lost.
The consequence of the portal mania. Our pal Googzilla. The failure of portals opened the door to my favorite example of received wisdom (portals are the future) creating the space for a hyperconstruct to reshape online, search, and a number of other businesses. I would have moved this goof to the top 10. But 13 remains an unlucky number for the companies who jumped on the portal bandwagon a decade ago.
Stephen Arnold, February 22, 2009.
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