Well, It made me laugh

Fake Steve Jobs is rather more concise than me:

The Borg-Yahoo merger won’t work. Here’s why. It’s like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they’ll run faster.

Microo?

So Microsoft has tendered a bid to buy Yahoo! for $44.6bn.

I understand that Microsoft has to do something to build on its web strategy/presence. No-one uses Live Search, Live Spaces, or any of the rest. (OK. About one percent of people do). To build up any future trade for advertising, web services or development platforms, they have to increase market share.

I understand that Yahoo! has to do something. Their share of the search market is pitiful compared to the almighty Google. Their share of the search marketing budget is about 20% compared to Google’s 70%. And they’d just been forced to lay off a load of staff.

So if they combine forces, they end up with a market competitor?

I don’t think so.

Microsoft’s problem and Yahoo!’s has been that they have not been able to identify what they do well. Microsoft used to do operating systems and business productivity software. They were quite good at that. YMMV.

Yahoo! used to have this great directory of editor-approved, quality websites. Then they diversified. They tried to make yahoo.com all things to all wo/men. That failed disastrously because there’s no such thing. They brought on some cool people and acquired a load of cool sites like del.icio.us, flickr and upcoming. But still it didn’t work for them because advertisers don’t buy cool; they buy results. Yahoo! announced 1400 job losses just last week.

Why didn’t it work and why isn’t MS able to make any inroads on the web?

Because neither of them have a core value proposition when it comes to the web. You couldn’t sum up what either of them do on the web in one sentence. If a business can’t do that, then they are in trouble, normally.

Don’t get me wrong. There are bits within both companies’ web presence that have considerable value. Flickr is a cool photo site. Microsoft’s technet is actually very good, IMHO. Live Spaces is arguably a much better platform than Blogger or Vox.

However, for end-users, if you want good search, go to Google. For businesses, if you want SEM, go to Google. What exactly would you willingly go to a Yahoo or MS website for?

Microo! doesn’t appear to me to provide a compelling alternative to any of that.

Seeking Answers

Google Answers has been closed while Yahoo! Answers goes from strength to strength. The key difference between the two is that Google’s service paid vetted ‘experts’ to produce results, while Yahoo allows anyone to pitch in. The whole thing leaves a lot of questions.

I’m not sure whether the stats prove an uncomplicated victory for social search and crowdsourced problem-solving, for a start. I’ve really no idea which service produces better answers, being one issue. It probably depends on the question. ‘What’s a good Italian restaurant in Cardiff?’ will work well with the Yahoo! model because it has a wider reach. On the other hand, you might not want to trust folk wisdom for a solution to matters that require a specialised knowledge.

It does show that a free-for-all, give-and-take knowledge source is very addictive and, presumably, helpful enough. Involving people like Stephen Hawking and Oprah Winfrey bought Yahoo! a vital share of attention Google never bothered with. Also, as Brady Forrest points out, Yahoo!’s model could scale organically, while Google’s required the recruitment and vetting of answerers, a time-consuming and distracting business.

Is this victory analagous to what will happen in the battle between the Wikipedia and the Britannica? It seems very similar on face value. Not entirely, though, since their business models are different: Wikipedia survives on charitable donations and drubbing the opposition when it comes to traffic is not nearly as helpful as it has been to Yahoo!

[I interviewed Steven Taylor, RVP of Yahoo! UK here, back in August and he talked a little about the Answers service]

Chinese Whispers

Not really Web 2.0 or web-anything, but interesting nonetheless. News on Wednesday that Microsoft is threatening to pull out of China because of human rights’ violations.

The BBC quotes Fred Tipson, MS’ senior policy counsel, who says:

“Things are getting bad… and perhaps we have to look again at our presence there,” he told a conference in Athens.

“We have to decide if the persecuting of bloggers reaches a point that it’s unacceptable to do business there.”

“We try to define those levels and the trends are not good there at the moment. It’s a moving target.”

I’m interested in this, of course, because Google and Yahoo! have previously defended their decision to remain in China on the grounds that their presence is more likely to precipitate change and improvements than staying away. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft do indeed act against China, and if this propels action from other companies.

So sad, though, that it’s left to major corporations to take the moral stands our governments should be taking.

Good News for Homepage 2.0

It’s not important for you to know my name -
Nor I to know yours
If we communicate for two minutes only
It will be enough
For knowing that someone in this world
Feels as desperate as me -
And what you give is what you get.

It doesn’t matter if we never meet again,
What we have said will always remain.
If we get through for two minutes only,
It will be a start!
(The Jam, Start!)

There’s nothing like statistical rigor when it comes to research. And my little poll here is nothing like statistically rigorous. However, it’s been sitting there for more than two weeks while readers patently ignored it and it’s time to talk about the results. Anyway, it seems that it is at least as valid as a lot of the polls you read in the papers.

It’s good news for the Web 2.0 guys. While they were the least popular of the three options I presented, they still managed to garner six votes. Since the combined forces of Yahoo, Microsoft and Google only managed ten, I’d call that a pretty solid presence.

more »

yet another self-serving corporate blog

In what may be a PR masterpiece, the new Yahoo! corporate blog is nothing but self-effacing. My headline is theirs for their virgin entry. “Oh, yes, we’re going corporate. But please don’t hold that against us. It’s a good thing, really,” they go on to say.

Signs are that this will be an interesting read. Major corporate + apparent humility = addictive qualities. Check out this quotation from the first line of Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s latest blog entry from Sunday: “I had lunch with Tony Blair today. (And yes, I have been waiting all afternoon to type that.)”

How cool is that? He’s a big shot, but he’s just like you and me. He remains respectful throughout the entry to both the reader and to Blair. It’s good for me as a reader and him as the main conduit for communications between me and Sun. That’s because his opening remarks mean I might actually want to read what he’s got to say on the subject. He’s established himself as a human being with the same frailties as you and me, before he does anything else.