No one knew we needed a better way of searching the web in the late ’90s when we had Yahoo and Alta Vista dominating the web.
No one knew Hotmail with its 2MB limit sucked so much.
And what happened? Google had the balls to say “We can do these things so much better”.
This isn’t a Google “love in”. In fact, as functionally advanced as Gmail was when it first appeared, it still didn’t give me the thrill that I got when I first opened a Hotmail account. Hotmail was the first example of a Web App that I ever saw, and it made me dizzy as I realised what the Web was capable of.
Photo owned by www.butkaj.com (cc)
This was the buzz my Uncle had when he first saw, in 1950’s Ireland, an Electric Kettle boiling, while sitting on a wooden orange box. From then on, for him, the world was different.
But of course, amazing innovation doesn’t guarantee first place. You can improve your chances of retaining first place through Constant and Aggressive Innovation. Such as Google Search and Gmail has done. But what about the other brilliant ideas on the web that have sat on their arses when they should have been regenerating?
For my money, that one ripe couch potatoe is Ebay. In my opinion, its an ugly, hard to search, hard to use, dissatisfying experience. It may have been impressive one time, not now. But that’s just my opinion.
What do you think?
And are there any other examples?
