Yandex has been steadily losing market share in recent years. The good news for us is that the company is not sitting idly by and is taking active steps, the bad news is that Yandex's main activity is not in the field of improving products, but in the administrative and PR field. Moreover, in both areas, there are serious questions to the company's actions.
After the landmark victory of the FAS over Google, usually non-public Yandex executives gave long interviews to popular non-tech publications, in which they talked about how Yandex sees what is happening on the market. On April 24, an interview with Yandex CTO Mikhail Parakhin was published in Meduza, and an interview with Yandex founder Arkady Volozh to Vedomosti on June 1 (an article on Vedomosti behind a paywall, the main theses can be found here). As already mentioned, both interviews were published in non-tech publications, and were devoted to explaining what is happening in the market to uninitiated readers.
Technical Director of Yandex Mikhail Parakhin
Founder and CEO of Yandex Arkady Volozh
I will immediately spoil the main idea of this article – Yandex is very cunning in its interpretations and presents its speculations as facts. All problems with market share are announced to the public as the intrigues of a competitor.
In all their interviews, Yandex management (Volozh, Bokunov, etc.) persistently promotes the idea that he is Yandex – the last hope for salvation from the monopoly:
“Perhaps we are one such needed alternative. That is why the existence of a company like Yandex is an absolute imperative in my opinion. <…> If we had not achieved a settlement through the FAS, it is possible that at some point Yandex would simply disappear. And from this, it seems to me, the world would become worse ”
It is sad that Volozh was interviewed by a journalist who is not familiar with the IT market, or who prefers not to argue with the guest. The fact is that in the first world countries that suffer from the “monopoly of Google”, Google performs better than in Russia. Let's take Europe, where Google's share is hovering around 90%. I have been to Germany and I can say with confidence that Google Maps in Germany is much more detailed than in Russia. Google Assistant speaks German a long time ago, and any burgher can buy the Pixel officially shipped to the country. But the Germans do not have their own Yandex, and neither Bing nor Yahoo have any significant market share. Why did Google “become a monopolist” not spit on the development of its products in Germany? The fact is that the IT market is very different, for example, from the housing and utilities market. And competition works differently on it. Firstly, any IT service needs to be much more convenient than its offline counterparts, so that people change their habits and crawl to the web, and secondly, the IT market is changing very quickly. Yesterday you searched for a hotel and a taxi service in a search engine, today you use specialized aggregators (booking.com, Uber, etc.), and tomorrow you will simply command your personal assistant. Therefore, a picture of the world as simple as two fingers that only Yandex can compete with Google turns out to be a little more complicated – dozens of startups and giants are competing with Google, which are changing the face of the Internet. Before the arrival of search engines, there were categorized site directories (Yahoo) and if Google does not want to repeat the fate of Yahoo, it will run very quickly so that specialized aggregators and personal assistants do not come to replace the search engine, who will select the necessary aggregator for the user according to his needs. Yandex does not hold a monopoly on competition with Google, no matter how he tries to convince us of this.
“We see (measure) the quality of services in non-competitive markets. In three years, in the absence of competition, no one will specifically deal with Ukraine. The quality of absolutely the entire Internet in Ukraine is degrading very quickly ”
Let's start with the fact that this statement by Volozh directly contradicts what the Yandex CTO said when he explained to Medusa's readers why Yandex search is evolving faster than its competitor.
“We innovate faster, we usually overtake them. Because they have 220 countries where they are already de facto leaders, and the main task is not to break anything. They have to do any thing they do to all countries at once. This, by the way, is a very good approach, it is directly embedded in Google's DNA. And it doesn't exist, for example, Amazon ”.
Parakhin's idea is understandable, and in the context of the question – “Why, in your opinion, Yandex is technologically ahead of Google?” his explanation sounds logical. Here are just a techie inexperienced in media issues, accidentally hacked down the main idea that Yandex PR is trying to convey to the public – “Google does not invest in search in markets where it does not have a strong local competitor.”
Hopefully in the future, Yandex PR specialists will brief techies more thoroughly before letting them communicate with journalists. That there was no such confusion in the testimony.
Quite symptomatic is the fact that the “value judgment” spread about a competitor has changed. If earlier, when Google was a novelty for Russians, Yandex employees and the same Volozh in their interviews always mentioned that the Russian language is very complex and not like other languages, only Yandex can confidently work with it. Now, when more than half of the users of the Russian Internet use Google, the legend has changed – “Google searches well in Russian, only thanks to Yandex, Yandex will not be – you will live like in Europe”.
Finally, a little personal story. When I was little and was just choosing which search engine to put on the home page, Yandex pushed me away by the fact that an advertising banner was jumping and flashing on its home page. It seemed rude and disrespectful to me, I had not yet had time to formulate my request, and you are already interrupting me in order to sniff something. So Google became the home page in my Internet Explorer, which does not distract anything, but patiently waits for me to formulate my request. Later, getting carried away with IT-pop, I learned that there are two approaches to the audience: an elderly audience that does not confidently make their steps on the Internet needs to be told in one place about news, weather, horoscopes, a TV program, etc. Yandex and Mail.ru pages look like a Sunday fair, where everyone from different ends invites you to their own shop. Google works for a more advanced audience who knows exactly why they came to this page, so the interface has only functional elements, no flashing banners, posters and other annoying distractions.
So, what am I doing? Now is not the end of the nineties, the audience of the Russian Internet is changing, and Yandex is not keeping pace with these changes. You can blame Google for everything, but it would be nice to analyze your own mistakes. Yandex slept through the mobile revolution (remember what the scariest Yandex applications looked like 2-3 years ago), the voice assistant Alice is still dumber than the Russian Siri, Yandex does not hesitate to irritate its users – by going to their website you can refuse to download Yandex 100 times. Browser and set their search by default, but for the hundred and first time you will still be asked about it again. And God forbid you come across Yandex advertisements on underground sites that distribute pirated content.
I would like to believe that the company will take up its mind and begin to seriously invest in the development and cleaning of its services. Now Yandex resembles Microsoft under Balmer, but telling nasty things about Google will not be able to take their place in the market.