More People Leaving Excite@Home

More folks are leaving Excite@Home; there's a story about it at
www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/05/12/BU97621.DTL. I point this out because it's interesting that so many articles are saying, "Ooooh, AltaVista has lost its identity, AltaVista needs to get a focus." In my observation that's just as true and possibly even more so with Excite@Home. Aside from integrating their Jango search technology, which was a great idea and which I don't feel they ever truly leveraged, they've just kind of sat around and become more and more shapeless as a search engine/portal/whatever. WebCrawler and Magellan, two of their other properties, have become pretty much irrelevant.
Back in 1996 Excite was -- well, they were exciting. They were constantly doing innovative, interesting things. For a while there they were leading the way. Now? Well, now.. they're just kind of THERE. The NewsTracker is okay, but it doesn't stack up to Northern Light's news search or even AltaVista's.

They could get aggressive in innovating broadband applications, but if they do that they need to acquire a couple of application service providers and shore up their offerings, or partner with a broadband/streaming media provider. (Pick a few independent music or film studios and start partnerships?) They'll also need to a) be very patient; it looks like broadband access might take a little longer to catch on than was first thought, and b) champion privacy and ease of access. My two cents from nowhere near California.

Posted to Search Engines-Excite