It Was Just Inspiration, Right?
Friday, April 27th, 2007
As broadband Internet access, in the form of DSL, Cable, WiMax, etc., continues to proliferate, former 800-pound gorilla AOL is struggling to define itself and its identity in the 21st century Internet. Their solution? Copy Yahoo!
TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, among others, is reporting on the striking similarities between the new Beta version of AOL’s web portal and Yahoo!’s homepage. For all intents and purposes, the two are one and the same. The new AOL layout, first introduced by AOL Senior Product Manager Frank Gruber, is apparently even referred to by many at AOL as “the Yahoo portal.”
Now, granted, there are only so many ways in which to organize and present essentially the same basic mix of news, entertainment, sports and weather into a single-page portal format, and websites and companies are constantly “borrowing” design elements, features and the like from one another, but there’s a difference between being inspired by another and simply ripping them off.