When the latest CEO of Yahoo Carol Bartz said “In case you were wondering, Yahoo is not a search company”, I was shocked. I’ve been a PC professional since the original IBM PC and MS DOS. I was one of the original Compuserve users as well and I saw Yahoo and Alta Vista and Webcrawler and then Google come up from their births. So for me, seeing Yahoo ride along like a headless horseman for years was saddening. From a once pioneering role in search technology and domination in usage, to let Google take over up to 85% of search volume seemed to be simply a case of poor management at Yahoo IMHO.
Could Yahoo have turned it around and doubled or tippled it’s market share in search?
Yes, absolutely. But Yahoo probably would have had to take everyone in management and get rid of them and they just did not have the fortitude and the will to do it. I lived through mergers at Smith Barney and Citibank, Chase and JP Morgan, Kidder Peabody and GE, and massive outsourcing at Citibank. The way it’s done is the new people come in, and the old people parachute out. Some survive but a completely new management team is formed. Then they shed as many of the old deadwood employees as they can, because after all, they were part of the reason the old regime was on the downturn in the first place.
So today Microsoft finally got a piece of Yahoo, and Bing will now become the Search Engine that drives Yahoo searches. MS will give 88% of the PPC revenue derived from Yahoo search back to Yahoo for at least the next 10 years. Yahoo will also realize a big cost savings with this deal because they won’t have to pay the expenses to run search. Microsoft will double or perhaps triple the number of searches done in the world with Bing, and it will make that gain in market share practically overnight when the deal rolls out and cuts over. That shocking statement “Yahoo is not a search company” became true today.
Is this good for internet searches and search in general?
I personally don’ t like it. I would have preferred if a new CEO came in at Yahoo and turned search around and took over 50% of search. Instead she killed it and buried it – possibly realizing that the intelligent capacity and the spirit needed to win with search at Yahoo had been drained long ago. Anytime you let Microsoft get a big chunk of market share in anything, they are just about guaranteed to abuse it somehow with price and competitive manipulation. In the next sentence I have to be fair and applaud MS because Bing is really pretty good so far although it’s a tad bit like a Google Clone right now.
If I had to guess… what’s the next big Era for search?
I think a privately held Chinese company will develop their own SE in China, and the governent will use unfair trade practices to give it an advantage and ultimately dominance over American competitors. After gaining momentum in China, this company will enter the race in the Free World. Just my guess.
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