Lessons learned from Digital Equipment Corp (DEC) and Altavista
Altavista served over 300,000 Visitors the day it went live in the mid 90’s and served over 4B queries in year #1
Many of you might not know the story behind Altavista and how they flourished as the 1st true search engine before Google, Yahoo!, Excite and many others – but there is one lesson we can all definitely take from their history: corporate myopia.
If you haven’t read The Search by John Battelle, I highly suggest you pick up a copy. It’s well worth the read.
Altavista was born out of Digital Equipment Corp (DEC) by Louis Monier – and in 1994, Monier saw the need for Search like no one had before him. Yahoo! had a pretty good catalog of URLs and sites at the time, but it didn’t have search. Louis saw this hole and started his quest to fill the gaping hole where search was needed.
It wasn’t too long before he had created the first prototype of what would eventually become Altavista. The biggest challenge he faced was the justification of the product. Since DEC was in the business of producing hardware, he had to justify the Altavista project to showcase what DEC chips could do with data – not a bad thing, but in the end – it was.
The reason I bring up Altavista and Monier is this:
Louis saw a huge gap to fill where there was no search.
What is that gap that you are trying to fill?
Maybe it’s a new product or service, but I can pretty much assure you that the right approach is identifying a gap and filling it with a service. Creating a product and then trying to push it into a gap is much harder than the reverse.
