Minimalist Geek

In this post I want to focus on what I feel is a recurring pattern adopted by all of today’s successful technology companies, minimalism.

Let me take the following companies as an example to support this argument: Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo. You’ve all heard about them and most probably you either hate them or love them. With all probability you either witnessed or have been part of a flame war involving a combination of these companies. If not, just head to slashdot and go through some of the posts. I am confident you will find evidence of endless conversations in the line of my platform is better than yours, Bill Gates is evil, Google rocks, Yahoo sucks and so on and so forth.

Now, I do not want to start such an ideology war here, but in this post I will write what I think is the determining factor of why certain companies are winning ground, while others are losing it like there is no tomorrow.

So let me first compare Microsoft’s, Google’s, and Yahoo’s search engine offerings. I think everybody agrees that Google search dominates the market both from a business point of view and from a customer’s perspective. Now, do you think that only Google employs or affords to employ fine brains to come up with innovate and effective solutions to the ever growing search challenge? I strongly doubt it.

In fact, the search results returned by all three search engines are quite similar, so how come people opt to use Google instead of one of the others. Factors are multiple, some of them technical whilst others are based on perception, such as the Google is good, others are evil syndrome. Although this latter syndrome is starting to fade lately. As always, once you become the dominant player, people switch their views and go on the defensive.  I won’t go into those other factors here but will only focus on the minimalistic user experience factor.

The Google home page is clean and clutter free. The links to other services offered by Google are few, achieved by displaying the most common services and hiding the rest under the more link, and tucked neatly to the top left of the page. So all you see is the text box, and search button. Even the search results page is clean and minimalistic. Compare this with the Yahoo page. This page is chock full of stuff, links to other sections, articles, sign in buttons, and colours. You might say, but Yahoo is more than search, it is a portal, and my answer would be who cares. If I want to have a fraction of a chance of competing with Google I would not distract the users who come over to my site with all that noise, and instead would leave a clean and simple page, just like Google’s. So that the user can focus on just one thing, search. If you get to the Yahoo search results page it is not that bad and in fact looks quite similar to Google’s.

Microsoft in this regard seem to have grasped this idea since their Live search offering is clean and uncluttered, but then again imitating is easier than innovating. However the search results returned aren’t optimal. For instance, if you search for “jet fighter plane video” on Google the first hits are YouTube videos, whilst on Microsoft’s Live the links provided are useless to say the least. Not to mention that not only Google’s link match the user’s expectations perfectly, but I can also play the videos without leaving their page.

Personally, I do not know who still uses any of the other search engines. My guess is that a big chunk of searches on Live.com come from people getting started with technology who bought their first machine with Microsoft Windows pre-installed and you guessed it Internet Explorer defaulting to Live.com. But it is only a matter of time, until they see the proverbial light and experience Google’s search offering. Then there is no turning back.

Another example of minimalistic functionality and design offered by Google is Gmail. The thing just works. No hassle, no useless stuff. Compare that with Microsoft’s offering, Hotmail. Not only is their user interface heavy on the eyes and to load, the spam filtering barely works.

No wonder Microsoft is hurrying to become super friendly with Yahoo in a bid to take the Google giant. But I think it is all futile since you do not win at this type of game just by being big. As they say the consumer is king, and if Microsoft and Yahoo do not recognise that, they are bound to fail miserably. I am quite sure there are dissenting parties inside both companies that know this and if they were in control they would do something about it. Most probably they voiced their opinions, but as happens when companies have been in existence for such a long time and grow larger than life, bureaucracy kicks in.

I think both Microsoft and Yahoo have the technical ability to match or surpass Google’s offerings, but bureaucracy is keeping both of them back by stifling creativity, something which Google seems to have in abundance. And this comes as no surprise since Google know that keeping a startup atmosphere and culture is fertile ground for creativity, and creativity is what you need to be innovative. Also, a startup culture is the nemesis of bureaucracy and the home of getting things done. Thus, Google manage to keep the pace with the ever changing market demands further solidifying their position as market leaders. Hopefully, Google will never let success go to its head and become bureaucratic, lest it crumble under its own weight. 

So I think that whoever develops useful technology and presents it to the user in a minimalist way will succeed. People want things that just work, no more no less. They don’t care about and the majority of them do not understand the underlying technology. And I say why should they.

So what do you think?