Commoditizing Portals
from the building-portals dept
The latest Bill Gurley column is all about portals becoming a commodity. As always, it’s a great read. Mainly he discusses iWon.com and does a good analysis of their business model. He brings up some very good questions about other companies being able to build their own portals. The one thing I think he leaves out is the importance of brand. Yahoo maintains the lead because of their brand (and partly because of user inertia to switch away). iWon.com got their boost partly by getting a ton of money and advertising from CBS. That might not be the easiest thing to replicate.