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Yahoo Fights Back in Battle With Google
ChipGuy writes "Om Malik has a great analysis of how Yahoo is fighting back the Google assault. 'A handful of blog-evangelists, a couple of key buys - (Odd Post and Flickr) have turned Yahoo from a dot.has.been to the new darling of the chattering classes.' Yahoo's new initiatives like Yahoo 360 are even apprently making Yahoo Web 2.0 compliant."
It doesn't sound like they're giving everything away for free, if this quote from Wired, within TFA is accurate:
This article was a waste of 2 minutes. It meandered about a central issue with plenty of buzz-words and enough links to give a Wikipedian a head-ache. It can be summed up to this:
Yahoo has been unpopular among bloggers despite being a solid business. It has been playing catch-up lately with features and very recently has begun to surpass google with the features provided. It's actions haven't been about business, but about popularity among bloggers. As such it has become much more popular among bloggers. Oh, and the new areas Google has been branching into suck. So does it's search ability.
I don't know about other people here, but a blogger saying that company X is more popular among bloggers because of it's recent changes isn't something "that matters" to me.
Then again, I'm not too keen on the blogging community.
It completely lost me when I came up to:
The blog-evangelists unlike press relations folks, only write when there is something important to say. That is if they want to maintain their credibility.
Sorry, but blog evangelists have no credibility among those who like to use their brain when viewing news.
This article does get extra kudo points for irony (displaying google ads on a pro-Yahoo, anti-Google article).
Yahoo innovates. Everyone is just too infatuated with Google to notice.
Just the other day I discovered I can view a traffic overlay on Yahoo Maps. Cool eh?
Carl
Vote Libertarian
Well, lets face it, Google's projects are always changing because few of their products ever leave the beta stage!
Really. I don't use Yahoo! myself anymore. But I work in the service department of a computer store, and you might be surprised how many "real" people still have it as their start page or whatever. It's hardly a has-been.
About the only thing GMail has changed in recent memory is that I can now invite 50 people where before I could invite 6.
Actually Gmail has changed quite a bit. Perhaps you just haven't noticed the changes, but it has added several functions (recently as in: this year). One such addition is the standard view which allows older browsers to access gmail.
Perhaps you consider the changes to be insignificant so there might as well be none. But for people who couldn't access gmail with the javascript interface, the change is actually quite good. There have also been other changes, but I can't find a list of recent changes.
Google uses SOAP and offers 1,000 queries a day, while Yahoo has a REST-like API and offers 5,000 queries a day.
Google: $49.01 Billion
Yahoo: $43.57 Billion
Explanation for those non-financial types: this is the company value if you bought all the outstanding shares of stock at the current price (which probably never happens). Basically it's an estimate of the company's value as a whole.
I'm sure the "coolness" factor (and optimism) about Google is what is pushing demand for the stock. Investors are excited about it, and bid the stock up. That's how you explain why a company which is much larger, in the same industry, is worth less.
Here's some irony: when I did the research on these two Market Caps, I typed their symbols into Google, and Google pointed me to the Yahoo Finance pages. At least Google is smart enough to partner with Yahoo to provide results in areas that they haven't gotten into yet.
It requires GTK+ 1.x; I blame RedHat or Debian for installing GNOME when all you want is GTK. Requirements for Yahoo Messeger Unix:
http://messenger.yahoo.com/unix.php
X Window
GTK+ 1.2 or greater
OpenSSL 0.9.6 or greater
gdk-pixbuf 0.8 or greater
None of this require GNOME, only in the minds of the distro packagers.
Stupidity is an equal opportunity striker.
Fellow slashdotter Bill Dog
I'm sure the OP meant revenue when he said turnover.
We Americans use "turnover" to refer to emplyee churn.
Just one of those terms that was confusing when I moved to London for a while...
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Take, for example, Games Domain. A site that had been around for AGES (at least five years, probably more like eight or nine) prior to Yahoo acquiring it.
They used to have a huge PC game patch database.
Yahoo got rid of it.
They used to have a magazine section with various authors writing about the gaming industry.
Yahoo got rid of it.
They used to have demos for practically every game that had one, even older games.
Yahoo got rid of it, and instead linked to their own service.
See, when Google buys companies, they keep them running, and might actually extend them. Yahoo buys companies to assimilate them into the collective. This is why I will continue to use Google.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
>>About the only thing GMail has changed in recent memory is that I can now invite 50 people where before I could invite 6.
Recent integration with Picassa for sending pics, "basic HTML" version for people with ancient browsers.
>>Froogle hasn't changed in a long time. It still can't accurately pull prices out of many pages and coverage is spotty.
It's precisely coverage that has changed. It used to be US only, now it's international.
>>Google News hasn't changed in a long time.
A customisable front page was added a few weeks ago. Change which sections are displayed, in what order, how many stories from each section, plus your own search-based sections. (Not to mention the new feature that AFP stories are no longer linked to...)
>>Google desktop search hasn't changed appreciably since it was released. Same with Deskbar.
Neither of these has been around more than a few months. What do you expect?
>>Come to think of it, I am struggling to think of a Google offering that has shown significant incremental improvement since being released.
Struggle no longer, just read the "what's new" pages on Google...
The author of this post asserts his moral rights.
I personally find it quite cool that I can enter '83 kilometers per liter in rods per gallon' and get '83 kilometers per liter = 62 472.9936 rods per US gallon'.
You might want to take a look at this page
Yahoo is quickly closing the gap.