Come on Yahoo, who are you kidding? What kind of business gives up the fight? What if Apple would have given up the fight with MS?
If we look a little closer, the truth is that Yahoo! said that they weren’t expecting to gain on Google in market share. Ok. I can see that. But will Yahoo pass Google in other ways? You betcha. Look at the steady stream of purchases that Yahoo has made recently. The problem is why would you admit to being ok with #2 in search? Stephen Baker makes a good point: How does Yahoo recruit the best brains to “maintain marketshare”?
Another good point is made by the Unofficial Yahoo Blog:
I thought transparency and honesty were values held close to the hearts of bloggers. Apparently not. Let a corporate executive level with shareholders and customers, and the bloggers excoriate her for poisoning morale and abandoning the company’s business model. Ridiculous.
Steve Rubel even goes so far as to announce his personal boycott of Yahoo. And Scoble Agreed with him. Although to Robert’s credit, he doesn’t necessarily agree with the boycott, just with the not giving up the fight bit. Scoble also makes the point that there is still much missing from the search engines.
So where does all of this leave Yahoo!? A little tarnished I think. I do believe that the possibility exists like Scoble points out, that the quote is misquoted. But also, even if it is, there is still a kernel of truth in it. Google is to Search as Microsoft is to Operating Systems. The leader. But in truth, there is a lot more to Yahoo than just a search engine. There has been a lot of talk lately about how Google is becoming more of a advertising company than a search company. Where are those people now? Why am I the only one that is pointing that out?
IF Google continues on the so-called advertising company track and Yahoo! continues on the search track, who wins the search fight? Frankly? Neither. Search as it has been for the last several years is no longer. As we move forward, companies like Yahoo and Google need to(and have) diversify how they make their money. The race isn’t about search anymore. It’s about what other services that you can integrate into your search to make yours the more favored by users. Google won the first round with the popularity of Adsense. Yahoo! is playing catch up on that front, but with the recent additions of services like Flickr and del.icio.us they could make leaps and bounds soon.
Technorati Tags: yahoo, google, search engine, market share
About Shane Ede
Too bad…competition is healthy in general and especially in the field of search engines!