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Monday, May 22, 2006

Yahoo! tops in maps, mail, finance

Source: Bill Tancer's Hitwise blog

Bill Tancer from Hitwise had such a great response to his last table on Google marketshare, that he's now blogged a table that shows marketshare across each of the big portals – Google, Yahoo! and MSN. No surprise that Google owns nearly half of all search traffic. But then look at the rest.

GMail has just 2.54 percent of the market and yet CNET names it the best free email tool.

And Google Maps does not dominate in that category even though it's clearly superior to MapQuest or Yahoo! Maps IMHO.

This is another great reality check. Listen to the tech intelligentsia and they've already deemed Google to be the standard and moved on. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is still using the old stuff. What's missing here is AOL. I know a surprising number of people that still use AOL for everything. And some of them even still pay for it like the old days.

This is the change formula in play. People only adopt new technology when the pain of their current situation exceeds their perceived pain of switching.