David Emery OnlineOut with the old, in with the old
19 June 2007
I, quite frankly, couldn’t care less that Yahoo! has done a CEO swap, which is a shame as it seems to be the only news about today.
Out with the old, in with the old.
How novel.
I’m sure I’ve written before about Yahoo!’s inescapable success by irrelevancy – by that I mean that they seem to manage to be both by-and-large irrelevant when it comes to actual product (other then the ones they buy and let wither) while simultaneously getting a shed load of traffic to all of its assorted properties.
The problem with Yahoo! is that they are a media company, masquerading as a ostensibly a software company. Sure, Yahoo! has some incredible developers working for them, and you do see the fruits of their labors occasionally (like the YUI library, for example), but in the grand scale of things they very rarely launch anything technologically innovative using any of their core properties.
What Yahoo! now seems to be are simply what all the media conglomerates need to be: the product is content, the revenue stream is advertising and it’s built on a solid base of in-house developers innovating interesting ways of getting that content in front of people so they can see those ads. Yahoo!’s investment in technology and developers is no different then a newspaper investing in a printing press and trying to develop new technology so they can reduce costs and add new features (like colour, for example).
The internet is now the cornerstone of modern culture, and big media need to fully invest in it – by having teams of in house developers. It’s exactly the reason that CBS bought Last.fm – they get it.
For Yahoo! though, I’m not sure if they do get it – they need to figure out if they want to be a software company or a media company, as I don’t think they know that at the moment.