I think he's incredibly wrong, and I'm surprised by it because he founded Weblogs, Inc. and should know better.<p>Yahoo is now a media creation and curation company. Yahoo Sports is number one, Yahoo News is top five (HHS Secretary Sebelius had an exclusive op-ed in YN yesterday), OMG is killing TMZ and others, and so on and so forth. Yahoo's strategy of original content and great curation is all about stickiness. Let's be clear - Yahoo will still sell the very best ads for themselves, and Microsoft gets that sales expertise as well. No one on the face of this earth sells premium online ad space better than Yahoo.<p>Yahoo has clearly decided that they won't play in search any more, and that's a rational decision - they only played in search for a small period of their history. They were powered by Inktomi before Google, and now will be by Bing for the next ten years, and presumably something other than Bing after that.
"Innovation is all you have"? Microsoft has never innovated, not even at the beginning. Many big players in many industries have never been innovators.<p>These guys have something else: a strong bargaining position. "Innovation is a fleeting advantage." Cornering a market, setting up barriers to entry—those are time-tested and effective ways to make serious money.
The very first thing I thought of when this deal was announced was how similar it felt to how Google first got traction by lending their technology to a Yahoo "front-end." This feels like throwing the baby out with the bath water all over again.<p>I don't normally agree with Calacanis (although it's hard to argue with his success) but he's dead on about this I'm afraid.
suicide? how?<p>which is better? giving up the areas in which yahoo can't win, getting a good deal in return and concentrating on the areas they are strong in or trying to fight a losing battle, sinking millions of dollars in the process?<p>His logic seems to be 'search is very important so yahoo shouldn't give up its second place'. It doesn't matter search is uber important, what matters is whether yahoo can keep its place. They certainly feel they can't, so its very sensible to get out before the going gets really bad.<p>good business is all about deciding which areas to play, and knowing when to leave
Is tweaking some complicated algorithm, really innovation anyway?<p>I think Yahoo are better off leaving this problem to Microsoft. People don't tend to call Microsoft innovative and search is an established place that they want to be in - this is normal behavior for them. Microsoft are in a good position for doing search by acquiring powerset and other companies (as Jason mentions). Microsoft this more so they can compete with Google directly and Yahoo have better sense. Yahoo is doing stuff that neither Google or Microsoft do well, like Flickr, Del.icio.us, News and other content.<p>Innovation from the customers point of view would come from improving the interface to search, which Yahoo can do without doing the algorithm themselves.<p>If look at what they offer with the BOSS and search monkey APIs
<a href="http://developer.yahoo.com/search/" rel="nofollow">http://developer.yahoo.com/search/</a>
Yahoo is keen on this direction.
At the Yahoo Hackday London in May they were pushing these APIs with talks and handing out documentation etc.
In ye olden days, before google, yahoo was the search that returned the best results ordered by relevance. They had to create their index manually to do so, but it kind of worked for a while.
I'm really surprised about Yahoo's market share. I've generally found it a lower quality search than both Bing and Google, and other than this deal I haven't heard anyone talk about it at all. I know a lot of people that have their home page set to MSN by default, but I haven't heard of Yahoo being someone's homepage in years.<p>What's everyone else's experience with this? Does anyone here use Yahoo, and if so, why?
With Twitter’s repositioning as “real-time search”, and search becoming a two-dog race, both Google and MS must be salivating to buy Twitter. I wouldn’t be surprised if either of them laid down 1+ Billion to get ahead under these circumstances.
> Microsoft does not enter a market unless it’s important, huge and on the way to becoming even bigger.<p>Wait? So they've only just entered the search market? hmmm.<p>Ramblings methinks.
"Chapter three will be the two-horse race of Microsoft and Google"<p>Starts singing - - - I'm so excited.....<p>Dude, Yahoo search was dying anyway, which is a shame because people like Yahoo, it's just that they have not been advertising so much. Like google had the benefit of viral marketing, to counteract it, Yahoo should have aggressively marketed itself to put its name out there. I mean, people in Europe probably hardly know of Yahoo compared to Google, which I do not think is true in the US.<p>So, in an ideal world I would have liked the Yahoo search brand to be kept, but the brains behind it to be of microsoft. This way, if played right, there could be a serious competitor and who knows we may get a 60 - 40 market share, and in that dream world, the publisher, or the user would hold the power.<p>As a side note, interesting that although Yahoo stock has gone down around 11%, Microsoft's stock has barely moved, I would have expected it to shoot up.
So, there are just Google and Microsoft, and that is very good for Google, because a good karma matters!<p>And where is Apple with "the search for rest of us"? =)
Jerry Yang would have never sold out.<p>Now this newcomer gets greedy, some money exchanging hands under the table and now Yahoo search is dead.<p>Carol Bartz? she will be forgotten quickly.