[failsafe]

Originally posted by Tony Shepps
Google seems to really "get it" in every way.

When everyone else was playing follow the leader in how to make money on the net, Google played it calm. The normal way to go, when they first appeared, would be to turn the search engine front page into a massive portal page. Everyone else did that, blew the usability, put up these huge front pages that took forever to load and contained all kinds of crap that nobody cares about. Google said they'd have a different business model and a year later, everyone's licensing their search. Some of the lesser search engines are almost dead.

Deja was playing fast and evil all along. Their "power search" was effective enough, but when the time came to browse the results, it became painful!

I do worry that Usenet will be a less-effective community resource in the long run. Because of spam, lack of any effective moderation, mostly crappy user interfaces, the binaries problem, etc. web-based communities are the future. By then I hope that Google will have unified search of the web-based communities. Or something.

Also, part of Google's "cool" approach (and business strategy) probably was the $25 M + and expertise they got from KPCB (one of the premier valley VC's). That never hurts!