So many times I’ve researched a product, thought I had found a good solution, but then as soon as the return period lapses, I find a similar product that is clearly better.

Well, my latest example of this is with laser levels. I recently picked up a Craftsman-branded one. It seemed like a pretty good choice at the time, especially since it could be mounted on a standard camera tri-pod.

Now just about 30 days after I bought the Craftsman, I find out about the Ryobi AirGrip laser level. It just pwns the laser level category! Why is that? Well, it’s got a tiny motor in it that sucks the air out of the rubber base to suction the level down onto flat surfaces. That just rocks!

But it gets better yet. The laser is actually just an attachment that slides onto the AirGrip base. In addition to the laser, the “$35 dollar kit at Home Depot”:2 (about what I paid for the Craftsman) includes flashlight, helping hand and magnetic tray attachments.

Anyone wanna slightly-used Craftsman laser level?

[2(Home Depot page for the AirGrip kit)]http://www.homedepot.com/prel80/HDUS/EN_US/diy_main/pg_diy.jsp?prod_id=154217&cm_mmc=HD_Vendor_Sites-_-Ryobi-_-Direct_to_product_link-_-154217

[1(Ryobi homepage for the AirGrip kit)]http://www.ryobitools.com/index.php/catalog/tool/emm0001

I like “Yahoo! Finance”:1, but like so many other products on Yahoo! it looks so… NASCAR poster child. Friggin’ ads all over the place. Including the massive banner ad there are five ad units. That’s a lot of ads, but the biggest problem I have with the ads is their layout. It just looks like the ads were stuffed on the page randomly… it just looks plain fugly. Sort of like ’90s design meets 2001 Internet 1.0 crash bean counter looking for more revenue per page. Yahoo! needs to get in the way-back machine… back to the NASCAR of the ’70s.

But the worse thing about Yahoo! Finance is the complete disrespect for vertical space. I mean, look at the size of that banner ad — 230ish pixels tall!! Since you’re forced to scroll down the page just to see the content, ya might as well just put in a pop-up ad.

Of course, like a most of Yahoo!, there’s no new, cool technology like Ajax or Flash to make it more functional… pretty much just straight up HTML. Jeez, they can’t even set the focus on the “Get Quotes” box (at least they _finally_ set it on the Yahoo! homepage). Not that you can’t make a highly usable HTML-only site, but this just leaves a big opening for your competitors to create a much more modern product… and they just have.

Enter “Google Finance”:3. It’s clean, modern and good looking. Even though Yahoo! Finance has a lot more content, I think Google’s got the 80% that counts — quotes and related news. Google is going to own this space soon, and Yahoo! is going to be the big looser.

Why is Google going to win? Well, it’s not product… it’s brand. Google has such a strong brand right now that they can win in market segments even with inferior products. When is the last time that you heard anyone talking about Yahoo! News… or worse yet, Yahoo! Search?

One wonders what the 9,800 Yahooers do at Yahoo! (employees numbers provided by Yahoo! Finance). Google is killing Yahoo! one knife cut at a time — Gmail, Google News, Google Finance, etc. — and Yahoo! is making it easy… they seem to be oblivious to product innovation. Tired products and a dramatically inferior brand do not make for success in my eyes. Perhaps someday, Yahoo! will wake up a realize this?

P.S. To be fair to Yahoo!, Google Finance doesn’t have any ads yet, which is obviously a big advantage. However, I doubt that Google Finance will ever look like a NASCAR poster child (not until the next Internet crash anyway).

*_Update: 2006-03-21_*
Just for fun, compare the search for “Yahoo” on “Google Finance”:4 and “Yahoo! Finance”:5. Now, who gets it?

[5(Yahoo search on Yahoo Finance)]http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=yahoo

[4(Yahoo search on Google Finance)]http://finance.google.com/finance?q=yahoo&btnG=Search

[3(Google Finance homepage)]http://finance.google.com/finance

[2(Flickr user ckirkman)]http://www.flickr.com/photos/ckirkman/

[1(Yahoo Finance homepage)]http://quote.yahoo.com