Weird Wide Web

The future of world wide web has been in the limelight and heavily debated more than ever since the early part of this year with the official announcement by Microsoft on the acquistion of Yahoo! for a cool USD$44 billions. The Microhoo Saga has been keeping netizens and technology enthusiasts on the edge for the last 5 months with never-ending rumours, speculations and twists that can rival even the best stories from Hollywood. Although the takeover has yet to materialise [but still ongoing], it has given the opportunity to many online users to appreciate on the rise and fall [?] of Yahoo!, the biggest online portal at the moment. Perhaps, a substantial portion of the netizens are wondering why huge webportals such as Yahoo! with users in the hundreds of millions are actually losing to others who are offering much less services.

Here’s my crazy theory: In the early days of Internet, online users tend to flock to webportals which offer numerous services from one interface such as Yahoo! as choices were limited because most startups were still subscribing to the all-in-one concept. This led to the explosive growth of early pioneers and the death of new copycats for the next few years before the burst of the dot-com bubble. As the venture capitalists and investors were becoming more careful with their money, the entrepreneurs and Bill Gates-wannabes realised that they need a different approach and weird [and practical] ideas to entice the investors and challenge the Internet giants. Thus, startups targeting specific niches sprung up like mushrooms after the rain.

Today, we can see virtually every niche is being served by at least dozens of players that promise highly-targeted contents that are different from the ‘universal’ giants. In fact, many of the once-mighty companies are trying to sell off some of their divisions in order to have a more focused operation. This is because the numbers of users who are connected are increasing daily and the market is huge enough for everyone to have a slice of the pie. However, this does not mean that webportals are a thing of the past because they have also evolved to keep up with the changes and current demands. There are portals that are dedicated to certain topics such as online music and still brings in the revenue because they are highly-valued by the advertisers.