I use this term a lot. Perhaps too much. I saw it today in an article on TMCnet referring to Google as a paradigm changing company. Amazingly many of the things Google is doing now, investors agreed would happen in 1996.

We all expected Yahoo! To be that paradigm changing company and it never happened. Well it did but not to the extent Google is taking it to. It boggles my mind that Yahoo! should have been what Google is.

As you may recall, Yahoo! Went from search company to a portal company virtually overnight.

What I wonder is who steered us and Yahoo! in the wrong direction? In 1995 search was hot and it was where everything was going. A few questions plague me:

Why did Yahoo! Virtually abandon its business model and even outsource search to Google

Why couldn’t Yahoo! focus on being a portal and an excellent search engine at once? -- They had hordes of cash. They could have launched a rocket into space with all their resources. They couldn’t figure out how to keep their search working effectively?

Finally, what happened to AltaVista? I used to love this search engine. Shouldn’t AltaVista have become Google?