Yahoo: A declining star(I)

I like products coming from Google, and I’m usually less critic with Google’s errors than with others’. I use Google search, Gmail, Blogger… I even have a ridiculous financial position on Google (8 shares).

I’m a Google fan.

But I wasn’t conscious of how much I was a Google fan until I was preparing this post. I was getting ready to write about Yahoo’s CEO (Jerry Yang) resignation, and widening the scope, about Yahoo’s future.

One of the obvious paths for post-Jerry’s Yahoo is being acquired by Microsoft. Microsoft tried it hard before summer, and many Yahoo investors would certainly welcome a bit of money. Especially when they don’t know where will be Yahoo in (say) two years.

But now the price would be less than before summer, and it seems that Microsoft it’s only interested on the search.

I always thought that a Microsoft-Yahoo merge (which is different from a Yahoo’s acquisition by Microsoft) would be a great idea to put more competition on the table. Internet is the present and desktop have no-future. As consequence, Microsoft has plenty money but has no future. And Yahoo could give Microsoft the future it doesn’t have.

The obvious problem with a merge is that it would require a new leadership with an ambitious vision for the merged company. And that leadership currently on the table seems to be the Microsoft’s one. Moreover, it seems to be a leadership that, from a few years ago, is completely reactive. It fought against Internet (Netscape), against Open Source (Mozilla), against SAAS (Google). If Microsoft is a healthy company is because of the same products of nearly 15 years ago: Windows and Office.

When I was thinking about this, my feelings went quickly to that video of Steve Ballmer jumping all over the place and saying “developers, developers…”. I couldn’t remember Mr. Ballmer’s name, and I had a typo writing the keywords, so I searched for “developers, develepors microsoft”

I put the same words on Yahoo and Google. And aside that both suggested me to correct the typo, Yahoo’s results were, for what I was looking for, far more relevant, than Google’s ones.

For the record, Microsoft results seemed to compete on another (let’s say “amateur”) league.

I know that in no way this was a scientific test. But for me it was quite shocking that Yahoo had (for that particular query in my particular opinion) much better results than Google. And it made me think about Yahoo. I’ll try to write some thoughts in the next post.