Not just a storm in a teacup.

If memory serves me right, I never talked about the business world and politics on this blog. Maybe today I should start it - to show people I have brain and I think. :p

Last night I read Jeremy Zawodny's open protest to Google on his blog (title: 'Google Blatantly Copies Yahoo!?'). Zawodny, an employee of Yahoo!, found Google has copied Yahoo!'s promo page of upgrading to IE7 and sloppishly modified it. The Yahoo! PR group confirmed the page was designed by themselves and nobody, including Microsoft, has ever provided a template to Yahoo!, Google or MS's partners. Zawodny protested for Google's ridiculous and low act and provided two images to enable our side-by-side comparison:-

(source: Jeremy Zawodny's blog)

Yahoo! version Google version

The pages created by Yahoo! and Google are surprisingly similar - but note, Yahoo! designed and promoted this page in October and Google only started to publicize its version 2 days ago. So it is doubted that (perhaps I should say 'undoubted' to Yahoo! people) Google has plagiarized Yahoo!'s IE7 promo page.

And 11 hours later, Google 'revised' their IE7 promo page.

I read through the readers' comments on Zawodny's article and noted there's a respond from Matt Cutts (the head of the Google's Webspam team). Cutts apologized for Google's act - in surface, and then fought back by instances (which form the essential part of his article 'IE7 promo page') of Yahoo! plagiarizing Google's side ads designs and page layout, etc. with images for side-by-side contrasting. Here is one of the examples given by Cutts:-

(source: Matt Cutts' blog)

Google's version Yahoo! version

If Cutts' accusation of Yahoo! copied Google's UI design is grounded, Yahoo! is absolutely more 'wrong' in terms of extent, nature and visibility. So who is 'lower', actually?

Let's go into the reason of Google's copying. The laziest thought is the Google designers were too lazy or had too little time to come up with a new design, so they copied. I think, if they could get a new page within 11 hours, they must have had prepared a second version. And why did they prepare a 2nd ver.? Or will they be so stupid to copy their competitor in such a blatant way? Did Google intentionally plagiarize Yahoo!'s promo page to provoke them, let Yahoo! raise the issue and then go public, and thereby lead us to see Yahoo! has long been stealing Google's R&D results? Or the whole thing is just a blah marketing trick?

I'm pro Google. XD

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saintvenus' stereo is playing:
側田 - '情歌'