Cuil's Dangerous Strategy
Posted by Scott Anthony on July 28, 2008 9:47 AM
An article in the Wall Street Journal today described how a start-up company called Cuil Inc. has assembled a “dream team” of engineers to try to dethrone Google Inc. Odds are that Cuil (pronounced "cool") ends up like the seemingly unbeatable team of NBA players that finished sixth in the 2002 FIBA world championships.
Cuil’s search engine launched today. It claims to cover three times the number of Web pages that Google covers (in trial runs this morning it ran very slowly and found nothing under my name!), and displays its results like a magazine. President and co-founder Anna Patterson, an engineer who helped build Google’s search index, told the Journal, "You can't be an alternative search engine and smaller. You have to be an alternative and bigger."
To top Google, Cuil built a top-flight team of engineers with search experience at eBay, IBM, AltaVista, and, of course, Google. It is backed with more than $30 million of venture capital.
Cuil is playing a dangerous game. Clayton Christensen’s research found that entrants almost always fail when they try to leapfrog over current competition by playing today’s game better. Incumbents have the skills, resources, and motivation to defend against these “sustaining” attacks.
If Cuil’s search technology does indeed work better than Google’s, you can be sure that Google will be fiercely motivated to fight back. With all the engineering talent at its disposal, it is hard to believe Google won’t win that battle.
Perhaps Cuil’s goal is to be acquired by Google, in which case it might not care about its long-term success. If it really does hope to ultimately best Google, it better have a disruptive card up its sleeves. My next post will see if lessons from “anomalies” to the pattern of entrants losing sustaining battles could help Cuil plot a path to success.
