I was at a meeting of various javascript developers. I do not know javascript enough to claim proficiency. I don't want to know javascript; my biases are for Objective C and the desktop environment. It's a long story as to why I was there in the first place, and I left early.
However, one thing stood out to me was one of the presentations, done by some Yahoo employees. In it, they are talking about the myriad of frameworks, collectively known as YUI, built for the site. And I don't mean to demean it, because it is impressive. And lets them do some fancy things with their front page, showing all sorts of news and information. But that's where they didn't get it.
In full disclosure, I know people who work at Yahoo, and I know people who work at Google. They're all great and brilliant people. I mean this only as an example, although it's one I feel Yahoo could learn from.
During their speech, I loaded up www.google.com, viewed the source, and did a character count. 6,083 characters. Then I did the same for www.yahoo.com: 137,880 characters. Over 22 times the file size. Admittedly, this doesn't include images or any other external resources, but given the amount of content, this probably would increase, not decrease the difference.
If I want general news and horoscopes, Google's front page doesn't offer that, and Yahoo wins. However, if I want to simply search, Yahoo will take over an order of magnitude longer to load, and Google is the winner. Unfortunately for Yahoo, I have no desire to read up on Brittney or the latest tv episodes.
Sometimes, when offering multiple services or features, some services can actually reduce overall effectiveness merely by being there, even when there is no confusion added. Of course, this is old knowledge, given the term software bloat. But the lesson still needs to be repeated, with the following advice: When adding or removing services, know which are useful features, and which are bloat. This is harder than it sounds.
