Michael S.Malone writes, "For sometime Google has been the yardstick by which business and technology success is measured". Excerpts with heavy edits and comments added :
The indignity to Yahoo is unfair as Yahoo's numbers show: 165 million registered users, 345 million unique visitors a month, $49 billion market cap, and a 62 per¬cent increase in revenue last quarter, bringing 2004 total revenue to $3.6 billion. Yahoo makes more money and has more patents, services, and users than Google. Given Yahoo’s recent financial results and the expected growth in its business- Yahoo may very well be the most valuable business on the Web. Yahoo is the biggest consumer Internet company you may almost never think about.
Yahoo is everything on the net - offers specialty services,mass appeal, narrow and wide,shallow and deep – its both horizontal and vertical," COO Dan Rosensweig says, rather unhelpfully. Terry Samel has revived one of the great Internet brands using a classic tool of old-world business, M&A, and simply by giving the customers what they want. He has spent money in acquiring Web companies like Inktomi and Overture. As Om Malik points out –"Yahoo’s Overture division is finally getting its act together and rolling out its small-publisher service. By buying Flickr earlier this month and OddPost last year, Yahoo has bought into the open-standards, web services business model, something which has gotten it much love from the bloggers. Adding RSS and blogs to My Yahoo first makes them cooler than the other two - MSN and Google. In an effort to beat Google, the company has upped its free email storage to one gigabyte. Yahoo offered desktop search tool, just like Google. It is launching a blogging-meets-social networking tool, Yahoo 360".
Yahoo believes in horizontal scalability - As an Internet company, it's possible to continually add products and services based on market demand without worrying about shelf space or distribution. Yahoo has the technical capability to build most anything- recent additions like video search, desktop search, and RSS reading are shining examples. Yahoo has the cash to buy anything it chooses not to build. Each service becomes more valuable in concert. This effect is only amplified by broadband.
- Google is focussed on technology while Yahoo says their focus is in understanding what customers want.
- Google invents for markets that don't exist; Yahoo goes after markets it wants to own. If that means a state-of-the-art search engine, so be it.
- In short, while Google was busy becoming what Yahoo! used to be, Yahoo! has become what AOL should have been.
- After Yahoo delinked Google from search early indications are that - Yahoo! is actually gaining ground in Google's core business. These findings, along with the fundamentally different approaches to business, would seem to point to an epic clash between Yahoo! and Google.
Yahoo and Google are headed in different directions. Google is on its way to battle Microsoft later this decade, while Yahoo is looking towards Hollywood. Yahoo wants to delivering rich content to any Web-enabled device at any time, a vision that could make Yahoo the obvious next step in Hollywood's Internet strategy. Yahoo doesn't just want to deliver movies. – but wants to provide more personalized experience. Customizing the site down to the neighborhood level will make it more appealing to users and indispensable to advertisers.Powerful forces driving the business holding great potential for Yahoo’s business. Technological change and further customization will be constants. Jerry Yang says, "Access isn't sufficient. It's not enough to search. You also have to find - and then share with others. That's where this company is going" Yahoo has really come back with a bang – its proof that solid companies with dynamic plans and nimble footed decisions would win in this internet 2.0 age as well.
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