AOL, Yahoo! to slug it out in India

The famed rivalry between Yahoo! and AOL, the leading Internet service provider in the US, is set to spill out in India as AOL gears up to launch an India-specific portal this week.

While AOL Chief Operating Officer Ron Grant is himself coming down to Bangalore to officially kick off the Indian face on Thursday, Yahoo!'s soft-spoken co-founder David Filo is set to announce a series of India-specific products tomorrow "" a day before AOL is set to debut here.

The AOL India portal will be spearheaded by IT industry veteran P G Ponnappa reporting to long-timer Maneesh Dhir, who leads the company's activities including customer support and development efforts from India.

AOL, in its erstwhile avatar as America Online, took the internet access route to become a household name in the US. After Yahoo! and MSN started offering free email service, AOL, with its paid subscription service, began to feel the heat as subscribers deserted them in droves. Time Warner then became the white knight for AOL. When these two giants merged, many analysts believed it was, and

remains, the biggest mistake in corporate America's worst ever M&A.

Coming back to the India landscape, Yahoo! is understood to be bolstering its India management with the appointment of a new CEO to share the bandwidth with its current MD George Zacharias ahead of AOL entry.

Yahoo! India, which has had its own share of trouble being accused of plagiarism has, however, managed to keep its head above water and garner some good amount of revenues for its India portal. As Zacharias said, "Yahoo! India is among the top three in terms of internet advertising revenue of around $60 million."

Ormax is a consumer knowledge company that had done extensive pre-launch research for AOL.

Ormax Managing Director Vispy Doctor said, "For AOL, it's fairly obvious that mail will be a primary service. But if you're a new portal, your mail service had better be better than Yahoo! There's no point for AOL to try and challenge Google with its search service. Google's success is the algorithm it uses for its search, not its marketing. Google does one thing but it does it damn well. A portal will ultimately be strong in the service in which it offers differentiation. AOL will bring a fresh approach to the concept of a portal and bring fresh content; the timing is perfect."

"The whole notion of a portal is not understood in India. A new portal must spend money and energy telling people what to do once they are on their home page. The people running the portal don't realise that there may be 27 services on home page but nobody is using them," Doctor added.

(With inputs from Arati Menon Carroll)