The blogosphere and the web is abuzz with the Yahoo - MS search deal.
Ballmer and Bartz. (Yahoo photo, via
Flickr)
Yahoo has turned the clock back a few years to outsource the search and search advertising to Microsoft. If this sounds familiar, this is how Google became Google. It got its initial distribution by powering Yahoo’s search in the late 90s.
I understand why MS wants to do this deal. It is less clear to me why Yahoo did this deal. If it is for short term profits then it would have been better off outsourcing it to Google (which it tried to do but google got scared because of antitrust issues). If it is for strategic reason to fend off google, why let MS power the search instead of otherway around? In fact they have more leverage as they have the bigger search market share. After all Yahoo is a tech company. Search is the center piece in all of internet technologies today and Yahoo is outsourcing it to MS. There in lie some clues as to how Yahoo sees itself. It is signaling that we are not good at internet technology anymore and we just want to make money on the users that visit my site while they last. This sounds more and more like AOL to me. You know where AOL is headed.
It is a great deal for MS as they didn’t have to plough all the money to buy Yahoo and a take huge risk to make it work. They just wanted a better shot at competing with Google by becming the #2 player in search. They didn’t have to fork up a single penny to do this. What a deal!
Yahoo without the search asset is far less valuable. You don’t sell your core asset piece meal. Yahoo would have been better off selling the company as a whole. They should have just taken the MS deal offered last year if they are willing to this type of a deal.
Fortune had a profile story on yahoo ceo, carol bartz.
Fortune Magazine) — Carol Bartz wasn’t interested when Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang first approached her about rescuing the company he’d created at Stanford University 15 years ago. As she drove to his home in Los Altos Hills one day last December, she was prepared to be polite and maybe offer some advice. Bartz, who had retired in 2006 from design-software maker Autodesk, didn’t need a new gig, and she certainly wasn’t looking to play savior to a company she figured needed a CEO with media-industry chops - not her specialty.
Out of respect for Yang, though, she found herself in his living room, asking him to draw her an organizational chart. “It was like a Catholic school kid diagramming a sentence,” she later told business partners. Lines crisscrossed everywhere, with no clear system of accountability. By the time he finished, the hooks were in. “I got it,” she told Yang. “What you need is a manager.”
That’s exactly what Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500) got when it hired Bartz, 60, as CEO in January. She is likable yet hard-charging, given to salty language, and always brutally candid. (In March she told a questioner at a Morgan Stanley conference that she uses Google’s online maps because they’re better than Yahoo’s.) Bartz is also a known quantity in Silicon Valley circles: a seasoned executive who understands technology, is skeptical of the kinds of juvenile-sounding job titles that proliferate at Yahoo (Yang remains Chief Yahoo, for example), and thrives under pressure.
It will be interesting to see if she can turnaround yahoo considering she has no internet business experience.
Here is an example a promising innovative web startup getting killed after its acquistion by a major company. Jumpcut which developed one of the best online video editing services is being shut down by yahoo. Yahoo acquired jumpcut in 2006.
Yahoo’s closure of their Jumpcut
video service feels like the slow peeling off of a bandaid. In December they announced that no new videos could be uploaded, but that they “will be keeping the Jumpcut site up and running for the foreseeable future.”
Apparently the foreseeable future ends in June, when the site will be shut down.
This is the reason why I don’t like innovative startups getting acquired by big companies before they reach their immense potential. It may very well be that jumpcut may have died even if it was an indenpendent company, but it would have innovated a lot more and would have had a better shot at surviving. It is sad to see jumcut die. RIP.
Kara Swisher says yahoo and microsoft are in talks to discuss search and advertising partnership.
In early discussions that began in the last several weeks that apparently included a face-to-face meeting last week, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer are finally talking about search and also advertising partnerships the companies could possibly strike, said several sources with knowledge of the situation.
According to a variety of sources, the talks between the pair (pictured here) and also other execs at both companies are preliminary and also wide-ranging, focused on what kinds of commercial relationship Yahoo and Microsoft could have in the future.
But, cautioned sources close to Yahoo, the discussions are not about a renewed acquisition attempt by Microsoft and also might not result in any deal.
Yahoo music is opening up its artiste pages to content from other sites such as youtube, itunes etc.
Yahoo is opening its Artist Pages to others’ content.
(Credit: Yahoo)
Yahoo plans to fire up a revamped version of its Artist Pages on Tuesday, a service that lets people add content from iTunes, YouTube, and other sites to the Yahoo Music site that previously only had Yahoo’s own content.
The site publishes information including tour dates and music videos for more than 500,000 artists and lets people download and purchase music. Now the site will blend in information from non-Yahoo sources, the company said, part of an effort to make the site a better starting point.
First come modules from iTunes, Amazon.com, Last.fm, Rhapsody, Pandora, YouTube, and Yahoo itself, Yahoo said. (Last.fm is a part of CBS, which also owns CNET News.) Later, people will be able to create their own artist pages.
The move is part of the Yahoo Open Strategy, which aims to open Yahoo’s properties up to others’ applications and content and to make it easier for other Web sites to incorporate Yahoo’s content. With YOS, the company hopes to increase the number of Yahoo users and the amount they use Yahoo’s services.
Yahoo, who once produced original web video content only to scrap later, has now again decided to produce web videos.
On Monday, the Web portal will announce the latest in a series of niche Web shows. The short segments about celebrity mothers, titled “Spotlight to Nightlight,” are a stark departure from the company’s initial forays into TV-style production for the Internet. This time, Yahoo’s executives say they have found a sustainable model for making original video online, in part by explicitly not competing with television.
During the middle of the decade, the technology company dreamed up plans for elaborate talk shows, sitcoms and other TV-type shows. But the expensive attempts to transport TV entertainment to the Internet “were all disasters,” said Trip Chowdhry, a senior analyst for Global Equities Research. The attempted Hollywood makeover — which at one point even included plans for an interactive hidden-camera reality show — was scrapped in 2006.
Since then, Yahoo has acted as a distributor for audio, video and photographs from other media companies. And it has continued to produce its own Web shows, albeit quietly, without any of the fanfare that accompanied its earlier ambitions.
