Yahoo v. Google...cage match, anyone?
Great column on the NYT website from Atlantic Monthly correspondent James Fallows.
This was a very interesting look at Yahoo and its burgeoning subsidiaries. What struck me was that Yahoo is never really mentioned as a heavyweight in the digital world, it's all Microsoft and Googlegooglegoogle. Do you ever hear people say they're going to Yahoo something (as in, "I'm going to google my name just to see what comes up")? I actually use Yahoo much more than I do Google. My startup page is the very useful My Yahoo portal, and I generally use their search engine as opposed to anyone else's. I love what Yahoo is doing, improving email, quietly outdistancing Microsoft's Hotmail as the world's leading free web-based email and generally doing all kinds of things to keep pace with the Googles of the world. And they've done it all by being all-inclusive and keeping every imaginable service on the web in one place. As Fallows says, "while I know that eBay is at heart an auction site and Amazon.com a retailer, I have not been sure what Yahoo "is" - apart, of course, from a company with a $53 billion market value and weekly revenue of more than $90 million, whose sites make up the largest single presence on the Internet and, according to company officials, account for 13 percent of all page views." Great way to put it. Yahoo is one giant web-based tool, and it's quietly going to fight with Google to take over our internet lives.
Which I'm fine with, at least for the time being.
This was a very interesting look at Yahoo and its burgeoning subsidiaries. What struck me was that Yahoo is never really mentioned as a heavyweight in the digital world, it's all Microsoft and Googlegooglegoogle. Do you ever hear people say they're going to Yahoo something (as in, "I'm going to google my name just to see what comes up")? I actually use Yahoo much more than I do Google. My startup page is the very useful My Yahoo portal, and I generally use their search engine as opposed to anyone else's. I love what Yahoo is doing, improving email, quietly outdistancing Microsoft's Hotmail as the world's leading free web-based email and generally doing all kinds of things to keep pace with the Googles of the world. And they've done it all by being all-inclusive and keeping every imaginable service on the web in one place. As Fallows says, "while I know that eBay is at heart an auction site and Amazon.com a retailer, I have not been sure what Yahoo "is" - apart, of course, from a company with a $53 billion market value and weekly revenue of more than $90 million, whose sites make up the largest single presence on the Internet and, according to company officials, account for 13 percent of all page views." Great way to put it. Yahoo is one giant web-based tool, and it's quietly going to fight with Google to take over our internet lives.
Which I'm fine with, at least for the time being.
posted by Jeremy and Ashley Wood at 4:19 PM
1 Comments:
fallows always has been a tremendously insightful writer. i've always enjoyed his writing on asia, japan in particular.
you ask an interesting question, then you answer it yourself. why don't we use yahoo as a verb, like we do "to google", you ask, underlining your point that yahoo deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as google, amazon, microsoft. it's because, i think, yahoo does many different things. amazon does one thing. google does one thing. yahoo does many different things (including using google search technology for a long time there) and those things have changed and evloved over time.
your main point is an important one: we should be watching yahoo more closely. becaue they've gotten into the content business, creating content rather than just indexing it or allowing search of it, they now are a full-fledged media company and for that reason alone we should pay it much more attention.
good post.
Post a Comment
<< Home