Precipitated by the new My Yahoo, Steve Rubel basically relgates Yahoo to middle America:
[from Micro Persuasion: New My Yahoo Signals It Has Abandoned the Geeks][...]
The only sites where Yahoo has inroads with geeks are del.icio.us and Flickr and neither of them is monetized. It's obvious they're too nervous about alienating the community, so they play it conservative here.
I remember an era gone by when Yahoo was just like Google. They took chances. They recognized that the "techfluencers" were critical for driving mass adoption. Now it seems like they're a big conservative company that's going straight for Maw and Paw America. That's cool and it plays to their strengths but why own del.icio.us and Flickr? They should flip them to Google. Cut your losses Yahoo and invest in your mainstream winners - like Yahoo Answers. Oh and Yahoo 360 is totally a site that deserves better. It's a ghost town. Sell it to Six Apart. They'll nourish it.
The new My Yahoo is another example of how the portal has turned its back on the geeks. Yahoo had an opportunity here to take widgets - which are popular with the tech elite - and push them mainstream. They have always had a knack for making the geeky easier but the new site is just basically a fresh coat of paint. What a lost opportunity to build on all of the great work Arlo Rose did with Konfabulator and port it to the web. I wonder how he feels living in such a conservative company.
I remember just three years ago how Yahoo had serious Web 2.0 mojo. It took RSS and pushed it far and wide. Now it has turned it's back on RSS like it's a plague. The same goes for blog search too. Yahoo is clearly trying to be the un-Google. They have ceded the war for the geeks to Google. That doesn't bode well for sites like MyBlogLog. And further, it hurts their chance in winning in the Web 2.0 world. We are the ones who set trends. Look no further than Second Life and Twitter.
He goes on to say that this is in a paradoxical way a winning strategy: targeting the non-geek market, who are, after all, very much the majority of users.
Maybe Yahoo is becoming the Microsoft of the Web? The company that disdained innovation, and relied on 'grind. grind, grind' to succeed? The company that the hipsters loved to hate?
I wrote a few weeks back in a similar vein following the acquisition of MyBlogLog (see Yahoo At The Center Of The Social Universe: But Where's The Integration?) and back in October I dissed the 'new' Yahoo Bookmarks (see New Yahoo Bookmarks? What's New About It?).
If there is a deep, dark plan underneath the feet of the behemoth, this might be the time to tell us.
We have heard about the Brickhouse, the new Yahoo innovation space, and the wonderful people being brought together. But it appears like the machinery of Yahoo -- maybe just its vast size and the inherent loss of agility that comes from immensity -- leads to a process where products are extruded -- plop! plop! plop! -- that are middle-of-the-road. They can buy up innovative companies, and acquire bright minds: but then what?
Maybe it's too soon after the latest round of management shakeups a few months back. If the power is being realigned around new ideas -- as my Yahoo sources are suggesting -- it could take a year to see anything more than indicators. Bradley Horowitz is leading a lot of smart people somewhere, and I hope he builds something that geeks will find interesting, or he will face Rubel's Paradox: building stuff for the mainstream market that influentials and visionaries shun.
So, I guess I am willing to sound trite -- just this once -- and say that "it's always darkest just before the dawn...", but man, it is dark in Yahooland. So it had better be a very bright dawn, when it finally cracks the horizon.
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