Why Yahoo! Isn't Google: A Theory

My HuffPo piece comparing the two companies.

members-only post Jan 22, 2012 2-min read

Last week, the inevitable finally happened: Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang finally stepped down from the company's board. Whether the once dominant tech company can right the ship under new CEO Scott Thompson is anyone's guess. Insiders say that, with Yang out of the way, at least Yahoo! now has at least a fighting chance for a resurrection, although no one expects Apple-like results.

In reading the postmortems on Yang's 17-year run at Yahoo!, I was struck by how many products and services the company offers. Yahoo! Mail is the second most popular webmail behind Hotmail. It offers real estate, dating, chat, job search, weather, and a bevy of other services, most of which are free. It's still the fourth most popular site on the web according to Alexa.

Despite all of this, the company has clearly lost its mojo. As I write in my new book, The Age of the Platform: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Have Redefined Business, Yahoo! is much like AOL, Microsoft and MySpace: It's clearly much less relevant than it was a decade ago.

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New Rule of Social Media: Don't Miss a Last-Second Field Goal Yahoo! and the Age of the Platform

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