Michi Knows

As it was recently pointed out, Yahoo is finally moving forward on its Google-clone. I feel sorry for Yahoo. They’re still stuck in 2001, trying to be best of everything. On one hand are speculations that they are ready to invest 1.5 billion into Facebook, and yet here they are, still dumping money on search.

I know search is lucrative. So is real estate and operating systems, but you don’t see them buying properties and forking Linux, do you? I wish Yahoo would make up its mind and really set its eyes on one business model. Are you a media company or a search engine? Because so long as they try to walk both lines, they’ll only continue to lose the search market to Google, which is, at its core, a search engine company.

And if you’re going to continue to walk both lines, at least innovate. Right now, Yahoo is merely copying Google at its own game, release an application that is (supposedly) as good as the dominant player in the market. You have to beat your competitors by a wide margin to get people to switch. How is copying going to convince people to switch? Copying only keeps your customers, which, I suppose isn’t a bad thing when you’re constantly bleeding users away to Google.