Don’t Get Comfortable in #Technology

One of the things about working in games is that the pace of change; creativly and technologically is so relentless, you can’t get comfy – as Yahoo shows:

Indeed, Yahoo has been stumbling about for quite a few years, with nobody quite clear what its purpose is. I asked the recently departed chief executive Carol Bartz precisely that question a year or so ago, and she burbled around the answer. Really, all Yahoo is there to do is vacuum up spare display advertising while it provides a bit of news, and photography (hello Flickr!) and also be an intermediary for lots of email. Revenues are on a downward slide; Facebook and Twitter are sucking up the display that it used to thrive on.

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For the rest? Yahoo offers a case study in why you must never get comfortable. It has failed to focus on the money, buoyed by its success in one narrow area. In contrast, Google has tried and tried to find new avenues for making money: it bought Android, the company, in 2005 (Page and Brin didn’t tell their then-chief executive Eric Schmidt). It’s tried multiple times with social networks. It’s never satisfied. Yahoo, and Yang, got comfortable. That’s what will kill your business.