the feeding frenzy that began a year and half ago, never really stopped. yahoo had an asset that the goliath wanted., and the boys from redmond are too battle-tested, too tech-savvy, too much enamored with the bounty and too powerful for the resistance to hold up. you knew how this movie would end.
the story is not about the disembowelment of yahoo. i don’t blame the journo-types for feasting on the story. a proud internet giant taken down by the unstoppable force of the evil empire. it’s the star-wars type of a story that is there to be played. the CEO’s must guffaw. jobs will need to get lost. heartburn to be squelched. it’s a game, and we know how it is played.
they scored a touchdown on us, let the end-zone dance play out, the pompoms fly and the stadium announcers go wild. all yahoo can do is to set the ball on 30-yard line, get set, and kick it off for another set of downs. that’s what yahoo has done for 14 years, and that’s why yahoo is still here, standing tall, and it counts for something on the web.
the company has been the quiet innovator of online media from day-one. it used technology to do it – and i am glad to see the company realize that it’s time to stop chasing someone else’s story. nor someone else’s technology. knowingly or unknowingly, it’s time to lose the spent rocket boosters, and look for the next source of fuel to enter a new orbit.
search is NOT the product of the century – nothing can be a product of the century on the web. period. search is already a mature product. search has no feature growth potential. it only stands there to be picked off by the next best thing. with the talent and the the market position it boasts, yahoo can do build the technologies and sciences of the web that will create their own wonders for the web.
being the big player in online media WILL require new technologies. the traditional cornerstone concepts of the web – like scale, like distribution, like ubiquity, like speed… will matter in this market that the also-ran’s won’t have – the cnn’s. the hulu’s. the twitters.
it’s the beginning of the new season of this show. so quit writing eulogies numb nuts.
Yahoo: Back at the 30-Yard Line