Don’t forget about Yahoo
John Battelle asks: “Is Yahoo dead?” and answers “I don’t think so.”
His reasoning is that Yahoo (sorry, I’m not going to include the exclamation point) can be a gigantic-scale platform for developers.
Indeed, Yahoo is very big — bigger than most people realize. When I worked there two years ago, I would often shock Bay Area technorati types with basic facts about Yahoo’s position. Number one in email. Number one in news. Number one in sports. Number one overall page on the web (since eclipsed by Google.com).
Long forgotten by Sili Valley types who watched Google build an information empire and Facebook a social media kingdom, Yahoo remained and still remains a force across the world.
(Full disclosure: My wife still works there, editing their women’s site Yahoo Shine, which is itself immensely successful in reaching its core audience of young women. I also still have some very good friends who work at Yahoo.)
When I worked there, Yahoo was decidedly a company adrift. Bad news — China dissidents, the collapse of the Microsoft merger, high-profile attrition, leaked discontent — seemed to overwhelm senior management, who themselves weren’t rah-rah types conditioned to keep the rank-and-file engaged.
But in spite of the consistent ugliness, Yahoo has soldiered on and even improved some of its best assets. The new, bolder Flickr is a huge improvement for the broadband age. The home page, stocked with great editorial and optimized to the user, still makes it nearly impossible not to click on something. My Yahoo is still the default home page for millions. Yahoo News and Sports are still the very best editorially-driven experiences in those categories. Yahoo has powerful market share in many emerging and established global markets. And Yahoo’s loyal user base across mail and IM remains its greatest asset. All those properties (except Flickr) are chock full of ad units, keeping everything comfortably monetized. So there’s a lot of goodness coming out of Sunnyvale.
Is Yahoo going to be a powerful developer platform in 2015? Maybe. Maybe not. While Yahoo’s scale, neutrality, and brand trust are undeniable, the expectations of Yahoo’s user base is still significantly different in character from those of Apple or Google or RIM. And hiring the right people to do this kind of thing — building out and managing a development platform — is crazy-hard in 2010. Double-digit unemployment doesn’t apply to web and mobile technologies; just check out the job listings at any big tech company for the evidence.
It may not even matter. Yahoo never developed a serious RSS reader. Did that matter? There’s still no evidence that people will want to run custom apps on a web page, Farmville be damned. (Facebook’s value is the social graph, not the web canvas.)
Either way, Yahoo is still huge. It can be bigger. It can be better. And Sili Valley is foolish to forget it.