Inglorious Yahoos

Yahoo has had a troubled past couple of years. While they remain one of the more innovative companies on the web (see BOSS, SearchMonkey, and Y!UI) they seem to be hurting on the business side of things. Who knows why this is internally, but from the outside I see a lot of missed opportunity. Here’s a few things I’d mandate if I were new CEO Carol Bartz…

1. Look Beyond the First World

Yahoo!Mail and the Yahoo homepage, used to be the dominant web portals in Africa and many other countries. Now Google and Microsoft exchange the 1 and 2 positions. I’m sure someone at Yahoo, at some point decided they couldn’t make enough money in ‘developing countries’ so they just never bothered to cater to that audience…or pay attention to it at all. No foresight. As ad spending in the States plummets they could have been poised to take advantage of more stable or growing markets in Asia, Africa and South America. Who knows if that business would be worth their pursuing, but it’s pretty telling that Google seems to think it is.

2. Yahoo Pipes and YUI Pro Accounts

Yahoo owns a number of innovative tools targeting web developers and programmers. Currently they offer them as free services to the public, in return they offer limited reliability and only semi-support them. This mean no one is building apps that would require heavy use of Pipes. That’s fine, but both Yahoo Pipes and YUI are incredibly useful for developers like myself so why not offer a pro version for developers who DO want to use these services for their next big applications?

Amazon has been offering S3 (Simple Storage Service) and EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) for years, now, successfully monetizing hosted services. Why not ’sell off’ unused resources (server space and bandwidth) to the public who can subsidize their cost while meanwhile building loyalty for helping them to innovate. They should offer data solutions like Pipes and YUI as a free service for casual users, but offer Pro accounts for users who want to use the tools professionally (this would mean support and advanced options like paying for bandwidth used). Once again, Google has done this (somewhat) with their own App Engine.

I’ve got a hole burning in my pocket to pay for a more reliable and usable Y!Pipes, some of the mashups it allows are great but without access to the source code or 100% uptime, it’s a no-go for real-world apps.

3. Innovate with Del.icio.us and Flickr

Although I love Evernote (it’s one of my favorite tools), it really shouldn’t exist. Essentially it took the general concept of Del.icio.us and applied it to note taking with online sync. Microsoft saw this one coming a mile a way and created One Note. But Yahoo was half-way there and then…they….just….fell….asleep. The bottom-line, is Del.icio.us opened up the market for online note-taking and sharing, I’m not sure how they didn’t see the bigger picture, and just create some sort of desktop client that would have predated Evernote’s creation by at least a year or two. I’ve since stopped using Delicious (I hated the name change) completely and I exclusively use Evernote.

Likewise, how on earth did Twitpic become a player in the picture sharing market!?!? Outside of Flickr, Picasa and Facebook, there was no market! With a few days worth of code, Yahoo could have integrated sharing photos from Flickr natively with Twitter and Twitter’s various clients. Instead they let a new opportunity just slip right by them. Of course, now that the cat’s out of the bag about how unsatisfying it is to be acquired by Yahoo, I advise the Twitpic guys to stay as far away from Yahoo’s board as possible! Run away! Keep disrupting their hold on online photo sharing (but watch out for Posterous)!

4. Utilize Acquisitions like MyBlogLog

I used to really enjoy MyBlogLog. Then Google introduced Friend Connect, Facebook introduced their own fBConnect, and OpenSocial came around and overnight MBL became yesterdays news. According to Wikipedia, MyBlogLog at one point had a quarter of a million registered users. That’s a significant head-start considering it was around years before these other guys started ‘opening up’. It’s not as significant as the 160 million users Facebook had when it launched fBConnect, but if Yahoo had seen the market opportunity earlier, they could have leveraged their hundreds of millions of users to create an equally competitive platform using yet another acquisition (MBL) that they didn’t really do anything with.

Last year there was much talk of Yahoo ‘rewiring itself from the inside out‘ to offer a more social experience to it’s users with Y!OS (Yahoo! Open Strategy) but by then it was too late. Once Facebook entered the arena, even Google had a hard time competing. MBL could have be revamped using Y!OS’s various APIs to offer a dead easy way for non-developers to integrate it into their websites, similar to what Facebook and Google did. But where is MBL headed, now? The picture below says it all….