more in common than they had apart. But where we differentiated ourselves
was less so with technology and more so with the consumer, and that’s brand.
And we worked very hard on our positioning and our branding of the company
in terms of what we wanted it to be. We tried to be this safe, comfortable
environment for folks that were just trying to figure out the Internet. We
thought of ourselves as the Internet on training wheels. A good way to find your
way around was using Lycos, and we worked really hard to position ourselves
that way. So we weren’t trying to be the souped-up Maserati (as a VP of marketing
used to say) that could go 120 miles an hour. And we weren’t trying to be
a cramped little Beetle. We liked to think of ourselves in that analogy as the
family sedan, the Ford Taurus. Not the sexiest out there, but very purposeful in
what we did.
We also were different because we focused on earnings from the day we
incorporated, and many others did not do that. We were a profitable company
very early on, maybe a year and a half or so into our life, and we really were the
exception.
Livingston: Which competitor did you worry about most?
Davis: It depends what day of the week it was. Probably Yahoo. Early on,
Google didn’t exist; they didn’t show up until around ’98. We worried about
Microsoft’s intentions for getting into the online world. Its pocketbook was
boundless. They could show up with a strong offering and advertise the heck
out of it.
Then we also worried about Yahoo because back then it was the 800-pound
gorilla. Yahoo had a larger audience than we did. We were playing catch-up
with them.
Livingston: Do you remember if you ever had to somehow make yourselves
seem bigger than you actually were?
Davis: All the time. We became the most popular destination on the Web in
April ’99—I remember it well. At that point we were the busiest spot on the
Internet—we overtook Yahoo. But for the previous four years we were playing
catch-up to Yahoo. So we were always trumpeting ourselves and talking about
the Lycos advantage. And over time, the parts became a little bit different, but
to the consumer not all that different.
We in the industry saw it differently. Lycos became more search and Yahoo
became a directory. If you remember Yahoo back in ’95/’96, there really wasn’t
the search feature. You’d click your way down into things. So you would say literature,
books, founders, books about founders—and you would click your way
down rather than just doing a simple search.

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