SpectatorBytes

The controversy around Ask.com’s new strategy to focus on optimizing their search product for a segment of their users (see Ask.com And Ye Shall Receive) has reminded me of how important is to developed products that seek to deliver a clear and well-defined payoff to consumers.

I am not saying that Ask’s strategy will succeed or not. I am saying that often companies miss the fact that to win on the Web, one needs to be a specialist rather than a generalist.

My favorite example of this phenomenon has always been the photos category. Think Photobucket, Flickr, Picasa, Slide, SmugMug, and Fotolog. Even though all of these are photos-related products, everyone of them has managed to achieve success and scale. The reason is because they sought to solve or satisfy a clear consumer need around photos. Picasa provides quality album creation and management tools, Flickr allows to easily share photos, Photobucket allows me to post photos across the Web, SmugMug is a safe and high-quality place to put photos, Fotolog allows me to create communities around my favorite photos.

I see in many situations where products and with them companies fail because they try to deliver too much. Comprehensiveness in features leads to consumer confusion. It also leads to poorly develop features. It makes it difficult to deliver on speed and reliability.

I see many companies that are trying to be Wikipedia meets Facebook, meets Wordpress, meets Digg. However, the companies that I see winning are those which specialized on a serving a particular purpose/need. These specialist companies obsessed about effectively serving their community of users. For these companies, consumer feedback is a critical element of their product development efforts. Features are the result of carefully observation of usage patterns and behavior.

These companies know that is this dedicated focus that will ensure that their audiences will stay with them rather than click away in search of a better tailored product — and by the way audiences are constantly tempted to click away given the hyper competitive nature of this medium. In addition, it is this hard core communities which ultimately become responsible for virally marketing the product to the broader market.

This does not mean that companies cannot expand into new areas. They can. As long as their community of users show new behaviors, they can seek to develop features or entirely new products that meet those new observed needs.