The Deal With Yahoo
I’ve come in contact with more and more people who work with Yahoo lately - Matt McAllister of the Yahoo Developers’ Network, Tom Coates and the FireEagle team, Bradley Horowitz, VP of Product Strategy, who was at the Open Government Data meeting but left before I could talk with him, and Havi Hoffman, who works on next.yahoo.net. Each time I speak to one of them or hear them talking, I’m totally blown away at how much they get it. I mean, they totally get it.
But that’s so out of step with the image Yahoo projects as a whole. Yahoo, the company, projects a muddled front. What are they trying to be? What do they represent? What is their philosophy? They’re a bit like Pepsi - the only coherent part of their image is defined in terms of what they’re not.
Yet this group of people I keep coming across at Yahoo seem to really know where the web is going, and what Yahoo’s place in it could be. If you took them and made them into a brand-new startup, you’d no doubt have some really amazing product on the market in a few months. When I talk with them I think, wow, Yahoo is really on to something.
So is Yahoo on to something or not? I kept trying to decide. Then it dawned on me that the situation is this: Yahoo is a giant company dominated by an old-timer culture. That culture has been there since 1996, and it is deeply entrenched. It thinks of progress in terms of getting more pageviews to sell more ads, and nothing more. Living in the shadow of that culture though is a subculture of people working to radically reinvent things. They see where the web is going to be in five years, and they’re working to drive Yahoo in that direction.
And what comes out of Yahoo is the result of these two forces blending together. Unfortunately I think that the old-time culture is the one steering the ship for the most part. But it seems like there’s a chance that could change, and the subculture of reinventers could be given leeway to drive the ship. If that happened, it would be like that hypothetical start-up I described above suddenly having a huge budget and gigantic team on their hands to do what they want. That would make Yahoo into a really interesting, strong brand. It would also make the Internet a more interesting place.
So could that happen, or not?
