Yahoo! hanging in there, by a thread
As expected, Yahoo!’s latest results weren’t good. The company is a zombie, and not just because it’s among the walking dead, but because everything it touches leaves the land of the living and turns into a ghostly, creeping creature. I don’t know anybody who uses it, other than when they stumble on it because of something published in Yahoo! News.
Now, it turns out that it has just signed a non-exclusive deal with Google to use its search results and its advertising as an income stream, along with Bing. What Yahoo! is hoping for is that Google can pull it out of what seems like a terminal nose dive and recover some of the search engine market. It had a 20 percent share when it decided to use Microsoft’s technology; now that figure is around 12 percent.
But the sad truth is that Yahoo! is a lifeless company, lacking identity and pretty much at the end of its days. What was once one of the great survivors of the dot.com boom and bust spent too long frittering away its advantage, and has lost its personality and culture, sacrificed its innovation by handing it over to third parties, bought promising companies only to then consign them to oblivion, and basically lost its way. Quite simply, it doesn’t know what it is that it does anymore.
The deal with Google will change the search engine map, but comes at a time when few people will even notice, because nobody is really affected by what Yahoo! does. Its few remaining users stay with it as a result of inertia or because they can’t be bothered to try something else. Improved Yahoo! results could perk up its performance, because they can now, aside from Bing, also be Google’s. But it doesn’t seem like much of an advantage.
Signing a Hollywood manager, returning the company to the leadership of one of its founders, and even securing the services of Google wunderkind Marissa Mayer has failed to pull the company out of its descent: it will soon be under the radar. When the only thing it can think of to save itself is to offer its declining customer base a rival’s services, then I have to say that this is not the company it once was, and nor will it likely ever be.
These days, Yahoo! is a puzzle: its homepage is a relic from the past, a kind of hybrid between a late 1990s news agency, it has a navigator that nobody uses, an advertising network grinding to a halt, and a whole bunch of seemingly random acquisitions. In short, a pig circus.
So what it comes down to is this: Marissa Mayer still has enough friends at her former employers for them to still grant her the courtesy of meeting with her, and to then sign a deal that will give her business some revenue from its search engine. So there we have it: a company that was a genuine internet star in the 1990s is still hanging in there, but by a thread.
(En español, aquí)
