Google Search

In 1998, Yahoo, AltaVista, and Excite were all racing to be the internet's home page, cramming stock tickers, horoscopes, news, and chat around a search box buried in the middle. The theory was stickiness: keep people home, sell more ads. Larry Page and Sergey Brin bet on the opposite, an almost aggressively empty page that let you finish your task in seconds and leave. It became a verb.

This is a strategy case about the discipline of doing one thing better than anyone instead of doing everything adequately. It sharpens the choice every operator faces between adding features and deepening a core, and why the portals lost despite being well run. The principle behind the minimal page, and how to know if your core job is actually good enough, is what the app makes explicit.