Since the announcement that Terry Semel has stepped down, Yahoo has agreed to acquire collegiate sports site Rivals.com, and some interesting rumors are circulating. Some analysts believe that Yahoo won't be an independent company a year from now. That casts News Corp's supposed consideration of handing MySpace over to Yahoo in exchange for a 25 percent stake in the search engine in an intriguing light. But the real hope for Yahoo's future, to judge from a recent Wired piece, lies in thinking outside the box.
True, that sounds like the biggest cliche in the book. But here's the reasoning: conventional wisdom has been saying that Yahoo is a media company while Google is all about the technology. The truth is that they're both content companies; Yahoo just doesn't recognize that what Google is doing is content. In this case, the content is software.
Think about it. Google's search, its Gmail, its calendar, Google Earth, Picasa, and more...it's all content, just highly interactive. That's the real reason that web surfers use those applications. Yahoo really should be able to win in this space; it has many of the same offerings, and it has far more of an investment in web 2.0-style interaction, if for no other reason than that it has purchased more web 2.0 companies than anyone (as it acknowledged last year in its April Fool's blog entry).
Am I saying that Yahoo needs to cast itself as another Google? No. Yahoo needs to understand why Google became as popular as it did, and see what it can do to fill that same need. Yang's stated goal of doing better by his own people, especially his engineers, should help with that; it's going to take some real technological genius to catch up to Google. Beating Google, on the other hand, means understanding the needs of users better than Google, and getting the message out. Jerry Yang and Susan Decker just might be the right team to do this, but time alone will tell.
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