In these days of Google-mania it seems that Google has become the ultimate yardstick. I think this is strange as there is nothing standard about Google - it is the outlier, the edge-case and not definitely not representative of the market at large.

An unreasonable amount of speculation around Google and the companies seen to compete with them has an unnatural effect on people’s interpretation of the state of a business or validity of a strategy.

We’ve seen google become a verb (and yes people are googling on Yahoo as well) but to me the past-tense variation of this verb (’googled’) has another meaning, that of companies affected (positively or negatively) by the overblown nature of the Google-myth at present. To put this word in context I think Yahoo is currently being partially ‘googled’. ‘googled’, to a company undergoing this phenomenon, is probably also a synonym of any number of slang words for coitus.

Google products entering new spaces cause people both inside and outside companies in the same space to make irrational decisions. Strategies change, stock prices drop and, from my experience, often for naught - many companies will report that Google entering their space, despite their initial panic and countless crisis meetings, actually saw an upturn in their own businesses.

A phrase I have always been fond of is ‘the elephant in the room‘. It evokes a brilliantly comic scene in my mind of some very sincere looking people talking whilst carefully ignoring an elephant which is perched in the corner of the room. This image visits me frequently when reading discussion about the state of the Yahoo business. It seems that many posters, enamoured with the creativity of Google’s endless list of products, fail to acknowledge the presence of the most successful publisher on the internet.

I certainly don’t want to downplay the issues at Yahoo, they clearly have structural issues which need to be addressed but I can’t help but just point at that friggin elephant that just sits there quietly blinking in the corner. Its a room with glass windows so the general public can see the elephant and they actually spend quite a bit of their time looking at it. It collects their mail for them, provides them news, helps them shop… sure, it looks like a patchwork quilt because many groups of talented frankenstein-like specialists helped put him together whilst carefully avoiding talking to eachother… but he’s always doing more for the public and his public go to him first when they are in need of information or a tool.

Meanwhile, us, the industry-types, the money-people, the other animals in this room are all looking at the chimpanzee that can poop primary colors and are throwing it peanuts.

I finally got started on some script to make IE handle firebug debug calls (console.debug etc.) gracefully and to display what it could when I read that a new (and apparently much changed) version was soon to be available.

Then when I actually got around to downloading it I find that they now package firebug with a cross-browser javascript-only library. Including this in your development environment by including the ‘Firebug Lite’ script in your pages presumably works like my script by defining a console object and providing the same external interface to Firebug proper. This then allows you to test in IE without IE choking on undefined functions such as console.debug() calls.

I should have written this code ages ago as I would have saved time in not accidentally checking in Firebug calls which broke IE testing for QA. I am glad they have addressed this (even though I lost an afternoon writing some redundant code) and I am also really impressed with the latest version of Firebug.

I think it might be time to include a build step in my project to allow me to remove Firebug debug calls from production code (as well as compress our css/js)

If you haven’t already - grab a beta copy of Firebug 1.0 Beta