AOL has started beta testing a new home page (the main AOL.com portal). AOL Senior Product Manager (and occasional TechCrunch contributor) Frank Gruber introduced it on his personal blog earlier today, although he is not the product manager for the product.
Nice portal…but it is nearly identical to Yahoo home page, which was redesigned last year. Click on the image above for a larger view. Internally, I’m hearing AOLers refer to the new portal as “the Yahoo Portal” although its official name is AOL 3.0.
Internet companies like to copy things from their competitors that work, but as we’ve seen even the largest companies sometimes get caught copying a little too much.
AOL says they are building best of breed products, not simply copying things from Google, Yahoo and others that are proven to work and porting them to its less cutting-edge audience. In the past year, though, we’ve seen them largely copy digg and then release a new mail product that would have been awesome two years ago but which stacks up poorly to the current versions of Gmail and Yahoo Mail.
David Liu, Senior Vice President of Portals & Personal Media at AOL, has told me that a number of new products in development are going to be impressive. I’ve seen early demos and wireframes of some of them, and I think he’s right. The company needs a category killer to get some street cred.
The surprising thing about this article is that the author seems to be agreeing that something within the AOL product demos he says he saw was impressive. Then he observes that AOL needs a category killer to give it street cred. Sounds like, AOL at least, are hoping they have a category killer. Now if that turned out to be the case, that they actually had something genuinely strong & distinctive at the products level that helped revive their street cred, the decision to play it copycat safe on the portal design would become a more understandable extension of ‘executing on the basics’.
Make no mistake, this is ALL Ron Grant’s doing. He directed the portal team to copy Yahoo. Micromanagement down to the pixel. This is the first of many products that will be clones of their competitors. Check out AOL’s India portal search page.
http://search.aol.in/msrp-in/w.....ue&cr=
Look like any other search results page you know? Word is this will be rolled out to U.S. search as well soon.
At least David Gang - previously at AOL, recently canned from WebMD - would listen to people who wrked for him, even if he could be dictatorial at times. Ron doesn’t.
AOLers are pissed. Who wants to work for a company where the COO is this far in the weeds?
There are inovative people in the trenches at AOL. Check out the blogs of John Panzer, Kevin Lawver, Rocky Agrawal and Frank Gruber for a few.
Instead of innovating, management continues to piss away money on shit like OpenRide and building yet another new client no one will use.
With both companies doing failry lousy these days, ia m not surprised. AOL had been dog for many years now. They lost the browser battle after buying Netscape, everything they touch is turning into poo.
AOL Sucks!!!
Wow - total copy of Yahoo…
What’s all this garbage of Yahoo buying AOL. AOL is a waste of money. Yahoo is cash flow positive and doesn’t need AOL. Not to mention that Google owns 5% of AOL… so how would that work?! Maybe Google wants to buy both? HAHA! Get real.
As a former AOL employee and responsible for the client home page for 5 years, I just can say that I’m horrified. AOL has such a strenght in building HP…