Are Q&A startups a threat to Google?

My tech op-ed article posted this morning at Venturebeat, "Are Q&A startups a threat to Google?", and was reposted at the NYTimes site here. [Update] Also Techmeme-ed here, which is cool since it's my favorite news aggregator.

Most of my interview transcript with Ro Choy, CEO of Peerpong, and Charlie Cheever, Co-founder of Quora, was edited out, so below are some of their additional insights:

When did the light bulb for Quora go off for you?

Charlie Cheever: Over the last few years, there have been a bunch of services that have let people put more and more content onto the Internet -- Facebook and Flickr for photos, Twitter for link sharing, status updates, etc. -- but we didn't see any great way for people to share the knowledge that they accumulate over their lives, so we wanted to make a place for that. There were other things as well. For example, I like blogging but I didn't always know what people wanted me to write about. One thing we've tried to build Quora to provide is a good set of prompts from other people that you can respond to.

When you looked at this opportunity, what were the comparables? Yahoo! Answers, Google, or others?

Charlie Cheever: We thought about all those things but we’ve mostly been focused on making a product to fill a need we saw in the world. I do think there are a lot of things that people want to know that you can't find easily with a search engine because the information either isn't on the web yet, or isn't there in a form that you can easily consume. This is especially true with long tail content.

Ro Choy: Our focus and good corollary is Google. Google can effectively find content through use of pagerank. Can we do that for people? If you believe the vast amount of knowledge doesn’t exist online yet, then if you could ultimately categorize an index of content, publish it, and make it searchable…. If you could do this for 50 million, 100 million people, or half a billion people -- that was the Big Hairy Audacious Goal.

"Why Didn't Existing Companies like Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo Succeed at Social Networking?"

I've been trying out Quora and Peerpong lately, so I decided to post some of my answers here. It's rapid response, which I typically don't like to do, but I've sucked it up and decided such thinking is foolish since I'm not a professional journalist. Anyway, my answer to the above question:

I would say additional factors are the lack of design and marketing influences in Google's product development process. Google's engineering driven culture is the reason for its success, but also a factor in its failure in some areas. I'm not saying Google should be design driven like Apple, but a little balance is good. I also heard some product managers complain how influence tilts towards the engineers.

And once you're behind in the market, spending on advertising is a good avenue to catch up (i.e. Microsoft's Bing) but this goes against Google's mantra of zero marketing spend. Only recently has Google started to spend significant amounts of ad/marketing money to compete in the enterprise space, but it could have done this with Orkut while trying to upgrade and improve it.

The amazing fact that is sometimes forgotten is that Orkut is a top 50 site worldwide, number one is Brazil and India, and essentially the business/name card for everyone in Brazil. This is done with zero marketing. Sort of a shame that Google didn't place more emphasis on developing and marketing Orkut early on while MySpace and Facebook were just starting out.