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Yahoo or Yahwho?
November 07, 2005
In my research for last week's post, as well as this week's post, I have been struck by how much of a "business" the search engines really are. Oh they try and put a different face on things, but in reality they are clawing and scratching for market share just like the search results for Britney Spears. Why? Because of money and power, but I'll save that for another post.
I steered away from digging into numbers in last weeks post and will follow suit this week. Numbers, surprisingly as it may seem, can show an awful lot about what anyone cares about, whether it's a person or a company. (What would your spending reveal about you…) But for the sake of time and not wanting to bore myself as well as you the reader, I'll focus on information, not necessarily numbers.
I came across an excellent article from James Fallows in the New York Times about Yahoo and where they are going as a company. They mentioned several ways in which they are different from their main competitor, Google, and ways that they want to leverage their strengths to remain strong in their industry.
Yahoo seems to be focusing in on becoming small-minded. What I mean by this is they see the online future as smaller social networks where friends share reviews, advice, etc. This is a logical step for them as they have a great stronghold in user groups, forums, shopping, etc. Their "portal" approach has won millions of fans and thus ensuring that Yahoo will never become Yahwho?
Now for some numbers, sort of. Yahoo was one of the few companies to survive the dot-com bubble bursting. Looking at their historical stock chart is almost like looking at a histogram of the dot.com era. Currently, Yahoo's stock price ($37.65) is a tenth of Google's ($394.80). Does this mean anything significant; your guess is as good as mine. Suffice to say that investors love innovation and until Yahoo starts beating Google to the punch on innovative add-ons that attract new users (as opposed to further hooking the existing ones) the price difference will probably be significant.
In conclusion I am becoming more and more convinced that just as we've had "The Big Three" auto companies in the past, we're moving towards an awareness of a similar convergence in the search market. I guess it will be up to us to determine what bells and whistles we want with our search that will determine whom we favor.
All posts by Brent Sharp
posted by Brent Sharp at November 7, 2005 11:06 AM
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