So let's take a look at the value proposition example that you're all familiar with, with search engines. So we want to think about competing performance benefits that the first search engines have. So my time period here is kind of mid-90s, 94, 95, 96 along in there. There was one school of thought that bigger is better, that you need the largest number of pages in the index, and that makes for a good search engine. Second school of thought is that you needed some of the degree of freshness, and that they needed to be the newest pages that were indexed, and the newest updates that were available. So different than being the biggest, you wanted to be the newest or the freshest with what you were indexing and analyzing, and returning in your search engine results. There was a third school of thought on relevance, and that it is not about being the biggest. It's not about having the newest version of the page index. It's about having the right version, the right page, the right website that matches the query or the intended query of your customer. What we find here is that these things are expensive to figure out how to do. Most of the search engine firms that you're familiar with raised millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital. This is a hard problem to solve. It's an expensive problem to solve, and no one could really do all of these things. You kind of had to pick one. So as a new technology with a new user base, again, Internet, mainstream Internet, World Wide Web, mid-90s, there was no incumbent that you could look to and say that's the right way to do it. That's kind of a consequence of being an innovator. And that if you have lots of examples and lots of companies and lots of products that are already doing that, I would argue by definition you're not doing anything innovative. You're doing something that might be an evolution of what other people are doing. But it's not terribly inventive or innovative. Here, they're operating in an era where they were the first, so not a lot of people to learn from. You pick, you pursue, you hope you're right. What the different people pick and pursue? Well, let's look at Google for one. So Google interested in number of search results. They did fine. What they found was acceptable, there was a decent volume of what was out there. Some of their competitors had more, some of their competitors had to say, maybe even a little bit less. Nunes, the newest version of the page index and presented in front of you. Google, not the best in that either. There were other companies that did it better. Relevance is where they elected to compete. So when Sergey Brin and Larry Page were developing this idea as PhD students, building it kind of for their own purposes in their own research, they were very interested in trying to find relevance. Of finding the right page based on what they wanted to find, they began to find it. They began to be very good at finding it. They then began to share the search engine with other classmates and colleagues around Stanford and the Palo Alto area. And they were giving a lot of great feedback on the relevance of the search results to. So relevant stood out. That third category stood out to where Google decided to compete. What we see here is there are other elements to think about as well. With delighters. So the delighter category, we've added the two lower rows here. So save time entering the query, meaning that when you begin to type a word or begin the type of phrase, it will auto populate the rest of that phrase for you. That's what we mean by Google Suggest. Google was one of the first to do that. It wasn't something that was readily available by any competitors. That delighted customers, help them save time in doing their Internet searches because the engine was smart enough to forecast what it is they thought you were trying to search on. Secondly, save time viewing results, and that with Google Instant, it began to populate the return while you were still doing the search. So you began to be able to see some of those results. Different, better than what some of the other products out there were doing, that's what we mean by a delighter. Something that kind of goes above and beyond, and that is very unique. We also can see hear other competitors tried delighters, too. So with Microsoft Bing, to this day there's still an image of the day that's on the website. So go to Bing.com, you'll see there's an image. It will be an airplane, a tree, a person, a place, a variety of things. Novel, sure. Interesting, maybe. Valuable, I don't know that if you're trying to do an Internet search that an image of the day really does a lot for me. Doesn't really help me do that Search better. Similarly, On this day in history, still there to this day. You go in and you'll figure out on January 15th or October the 12th, or whatever date that might be that you happen to be doing your search. They're going to give you a little bit of background on what happened in history on this day. Interesting? Maybe. Helpful in your search? I don't think so. So again, be careful that when you're doing things that you're aligning them with the value proposition that you're trying to deliver, that you're staying on target with what it is. Your customers trying to achieve their job to be done, the why of what they're using your product. You're not just adding features and functions because you think it's novel or cute, it's something that's going to be purposeful and meaningful.
