Chronicles of a Wandering Mind

Google - Yahoo competition is heating up. The main battle field seems to be the search and how to get advertisers. Google seems ahead with ever increasing revenues where Yahoo is struggling.

The NYTimes article states clearly that Yahoo has a greater audience using larger set of web services (although weak in search).

I am a Yahoo! customer. I personally use Yahoo premium services Mail, etc., and our company is using web/email hosting services provided by Yahoo. These services have been around for a while, and we’re reasonably happy with them. The thing is Yahoo has not add anything in this area for years!

One would think that as it provides differentiation (less dependency in ad revenue) premium services and services for small and midsize businesses would be an attractive business for Yahoo. May be due to the billions flowing into the Google’s pockets, Yahoo seemed to be locked into competing for ad dollars, neglecting other areas in the mean time.

As an example, we would love to use Yahoo groups in our company both internally and faciliate communications with customers, partners, etc. We cannot use it in its ad supported form for our business, but we’d pay a descent amount to use Yahoo groups as part of our website (which is already hosted by Yahoo). The same goes for calendar, etc.
Why is this service not available? I doubt it’s technical reasons.

On the path to becoming a “media company” has Yahoo lost interest to services side of their business?  Does Yahoo not make enough money from hosting, premium type services to make it attractive?

Does Yahoo need Google to get into the game to improve ? It seems like it took competition from Google to move Yahoo in various areas. Yahoo improved maps after Google made Yahoo maps primitive. One can easily argue that currently Yahoo maps are better than Google’s. Same story is repeated with Finance portal. Yahoo finance had not been improved for years until Google released their slick Finance site. With egg on their face, Yahoo followed suite quickly.

I hope that it does not take for Google to provide the same services for Yahoo to realize they are missing an opportunity. After all Google also has the components that we need: Groups, Calendar (excellent), mail, etc.

It’s time for Yahoo to take a look at how they can make better use of their assets!