Poor & Innovative vs. Rich & Stagnant

I'm worried about the tendency of new tools to emerge and then be bought by Yahoo!, Google or Microsoft.

On the surface, it seems like a good thing. A small, smart team like Ludicorp can develop Flickr and get rewarded for their effort by selling it to Yahoo! Good on them.

However, take Blogger for example. They started up, and sure they were a bit buggy and went down from time to time, but there was a new feature every so often improving the service. Since they've been purchased by Google, the service is a lot more stable, but I haven't seen a notable change in two years.

As I've mentioned in a previous post, I'm about to outgrow blogger, as many other long-time bloggers have, because it has not kept up with my growth and evolving needs (such as tagging, navigational categories).

I can't help but to think that if it had remained in the hands of the small hungry team that created it, they would have turned it into the mini, easy-to-use, CMS I've been longing for.

Instead, someone like WikiSpaces will develop a more robust service, outshine Blogger, and be bought out by Yahoo! or Google.

I think the reason for this is the organisational distance between the developers and the end-user. In the early days of Flickr, you could name drop them in a blog, and you'd get a personal note from Stewart, the company president.

I highly doubt that Google management takes any notice of your average Joe Bloggs, and if I got a personal note from Larry Page it would blow my mind.

The difference is, I say something sarky on my blog about a service run by a team of 5, they might take it personally and be motivated to change it. If I say something about a company with 5,000 employees -- I might, just might, catch the attention of a random employee, who, if motivated enough, might log this as a 'change request' which gets filled into a list with 1,000s of others, prioritised and forgotten.

If companies like Google and Yahoo! are going to continue to innovate as they did in the early years, they have to somehow maintain the spirit of a small, hungry team. And they should remember that small teams like that are always tweaking, and never satisfied with a 'stable' product.