Opinion: Is Yahoo! preparing to deliver the smackdown to industry darling Google?Is it just me, or did Yahoo! suddenly get interesting again? While all of us have been busy lauding the steady progress of Google as its products make their way into every aspect of our online lives, Yahoo! has been making significant announcements and product rollouts in sectors that may have the biggest impact on our lives over the next five years. This includes IPTV, RSS, messaging and localization, and mapping.
I must admit I was never a Yahoo! fan. Before Google, I used Alta Vista. Yahoo!'s browse-tree structure always seemed arcane and somewhat arbitrary, and I hated how difficult it was to drill down and find PC Magazine. And over the past decade, I think the company has become better known for its lame ad campaign (you know, the one where some yahoo yells "Yahooooo!" at the end of a commercial that asked "Do you Yahoo!?"). For all its effort, Yahoo! never became a verb. Google, on the other hand, managed that feat in just five years without a television ad campaign.
Years ago, Yahoo! partnered with our parent company to launch a magazine called Yahoo! Internet Life. I never really understood why an online leader would want to get involved in a retro activity like print publishing, but it did. The venture was successful for a time, and then, sadly, it wasn't. Perhaps that effort would be more apropos these days, now that the search portal is working its electronic butt off to integrate itself into our lives—and finally doing so with some real panache.
In recent months, the company has launched numerous notable initiatives and some that are, strategically, way ahead of the competition. My initial reaction when Yahoo! Web sites started offering free full-length sitcoms from Showtime for download and streaming (an offering that will soon provide content from other sources) was a mixture of skepticism and dismay. What, I wondered, did this outfit know about entertainment? And weren't Internet-based video-on-demand services notorious for under-delivering, failing, or both?
Shortly after that first announcement, however, I actually watched an episode of Showtime's Fat Actress online. It wasn't full-screen (or particularly funny; can't blame Yahoo! streaming for that, though), but it was, in the main, more than watchable. And it was content I would normally get only by signing up with Showtime; impressive, for a first try. Now I read that the company is launching an online-only sitcom—risky, but forward-looking.
Yahoo!'s initiatives are not just about entertainment. Last year, it unveiled a preview of its new online e-mail client, Yahoo! Mail (Beta). The event came months after Google's much-ballyhooed Gmail launch and garnered far less media attention, but it shouldn't have. I have yet to see a better online tool for sending, receiving, and managing e-mail. It works like a desktop app, not a Web page, and is a bona fide technical achievement.—Continue reading...
I was equally impressed by Yahoo! Maps, the company's new mapping tool. As with similar services, you can find maps and directions for virtually any location—but Yahoo! takes the concept a step further, letting you drag intermediate points from the route map onto the directions area to get driving instructions for a stop along the way. Overall, the interface is downright elegant.
Where has this Yahoo! been for the last five years? Could the company be like the racehorse that won't run its hardest unless it's in a real horserace? Did CEO Terry Semel and COO Dan Rosensweig get tired of reading all the laudatory Google press? Perhaps they smelled blood—lately Google has been getting more negative press for some of its more recent evil-empire–like actions. Maybe. Keep in mind, though, that Yahoo! is a huge company that's easily as big as Google, and with at least as many strategic partnerships. The kind of products it's rolling out show real forethought and development. So while Yahoo!'s actions may look like reactions, they're clearly not. The company may have appeared to be asleep, but from the way things look, it was just preparing; saving its marketing and PR energy and resources for the time when it would really need them. That time is obviously now.
In the space of three short months, I visited with Yahoo! reps three or four times to talk not only about RSS, mapping, and e-mail but also about a raft of impressive communication tools such as the MSN Spaces competitor Yahoo! 360, VoIP (including out-of-network call sending and receiving), and instant messaging. Some statistics—provided by Yahoo!—speak to the power of the company and why (1) it can compete with Google, and (2) Google will have a real fight on its hands in mail, messaging, and online video.
Yahoo! has 429 million unique monthly users worldwide, more people than the population of the United States. Sixty million people use Yahoo! Messenger, and Yahoo! Mail delivers more messages each year than the United States Postal Service, UPS, and FedEx combined.
Overall, is Yahoo! better than Google—or Microsoft—for that matter? Not necessarily, but I'm just happy to see the company in the mix. I like a good fight as much as the next guy.
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