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Thursday, February 12, 2004
It's the Product, Stupid: Lycos Decline Accelerates
Lycos' descent into irrelevance has reached another level with the announcement this week that it intends to become a massive 'social network,' an online fad recently hacked-into by a Google engineer with his left hand while playing squash with the right.
From e-mail to free web space, Lycos was never anywhere near the best at what it does, so why should anyone be expected to care until it proves it can do something remarkably well?
Case in point: the long-forgotten 'Geocities-like' site-builder category. Lycos has its Angelfire and Tripod, and they lingered on and on and on as seemingly key pieces of the Lycos puzzle. But recall a little startup called Xoom -- came along, built something far better, even went public and got acquired by NBC Internet, all in the blink of an eye. That's a more sensible life cycle in dot-com land: if something can be done better, do it quickly, and if it proves to be pretty much useless (like all of NBC Internet turned out to be), then kill it.
Or at the very least, Lycos could sell its remaining users to Yahoo and be done with it.
Posted by
Andrew Goodman
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