Have Google and Yahoo strangled the analytics game?
Predictably enough, Yahoo have launched an answer to Google Analytics. It’s called Yahoo Web Analytics and it loftily claims to provide a full featured analytics program, completely for free. The program is largely based on the Index Tools technology that Yahoo acquired when they bought the company, just like Google Analytics is based on what was Urchin, before Google bought it.
Urchin and IndexTools were considered two of the best pieces of analytics software on the market prior to their acquisition and the fact that Google and yahoo are offering them for free would seem to be a good thing. However, if we look beyond the obvious and the immediate for a minute, is this really such a good idea?
My point is basically that the smaller companies that might have developed the next generation of analytics software will now almost certainly not, as there’s now no way to make money out of it. Admittedly, either Google or Yahoo could do that, though if everyone in the world is using either Google Analytics or Yahoo Web Analytics then the positive aspects of competition are severely reduced. There is, in effect, less reason to do so – the next generation of Yahoo Web Analytics will only have to be better than one competing programme, as opposed to maybe five or ten.
Few would argue against the fact that ten heads are better than two.
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