Ask.com Falling Apart For No Good Reason
Ask.com is having a terrible week. The company laid off 8% of its workforce, or about 40 jobs, and remains in a state of confusion about its future. Ask’s parent company, IAC, is mismanaging the search firm, panicking because the company isn’t Google, when it should be satified to have a successful, stable, revenue-generating player in a highly competitive market. Why isn’t it enough to be doing a good job?
The fate of Ask is up in the air, as reports are coming through that it plans to become a housewife-focused search engine, centering on recipes and other items. Since 65% of their users are women, Ask boss Jim Safka decided to focus entirely on them, a pretty damn good way to lose 35% of your users. The response has been overwhelmingly negative, with most analysts dissapointed at the company giving up just as it was starting to gain momentum.
After years as the also-ran Ask Jeeves, Ask.com reinvented itself, focusing on quality search results and an innovative interface, and doing some good outreach with the internet community. Ask managed to hold onto its search market share, which, sinc the market is growing at a healthy pace every month, meant Ask had more users, more searches, and more ad views everymonth, regardless of however the hell Google was doing.
Still, IAC’s big boss, Mr. “I don’t know anything about the internet” Barry Diller, was unable to let Ask keep fighting the good fight. He removed Jim Lanzone, after years of good service, and now he’s pushing the company in directions that frankly don’t make a whole lot of sense. If Diller isn’t removed from IAC, Ask.com is probably done for, and even if he is, the damage might be too severe.
What saddens me the most is that among those laid off is Gary Price. Gary has to be one of my favorite people in this entire industry, and I had good hopes for Ask when they hired him. While layoffs are never good, being stuck at a mismanaged company can suck, too, and Gary’s talented enough to wind up somewhere better, soon, so I wish him the best of luck in the future.
Barry has a roundup of reactions to the news, and it seems universal dissapointment is in order. Many of us were rooting for Ask to be the little search engine that could, and it’s clear that Diller was the albatross that couldn’t. There are a lot of people declaring Ask dead, and with some reports that Ask is already using Google in its search results (and for what possible reason?), they might be right.
As for Ask.com going all female, the latest rumors from Valleywag are that Ask is reconsidering the plan, and may have shelved it altogether. Keep running around in circles, not knowing what the hell you’re doing, and I’m sure success will be right around the corner.
