EightBlack.

This site is going to gain traction. It’s got some solid talent onboard and this article by Kara Swisher gives an interesting perspective to Yahoo’s present dilemma - one of which is constantly being cast in the shadows of Google.

More fascinating was Kara’s upfront disclosure about her partner working for Google. Bravo. This is an example more people should follow, especially in the blogosphere.

I sensed the level of frustration last week at Web 2.0 when John Battelle interviewed Jeff Weiner, Executive Vice President of Yahoo!’s Network Division. You had to feel for the guy. The day before the entire audience had heard Eric Schmidt talk. About life at Google. About the DoubleClick deal. About the future. Schmidt joked with the audience, he joked with Battelle, there weren’t many seats available in the 6200 seat auditorium and both walls were lined with journalists, bloggers, and tech heavy media folks, all madly tapping away at keyboards.

The wi-fi in the room ground to an almost digital crawl.

The next day, poor old Jeff, was uneasy at best. You could just tell he was saying under his breath, “Man, if I hear the word Google one more time, I’m going to go postal”. Or something like that.

Seth Godin wrote a post this week which has been burned in the few remaining, non alcohol affected cells in my brain.

If you want to grow a valuable brand, my advice is to keep awareness close to zero among the people you’re not ready for yet, and build the most predictable, emotional experience you can among those that care about you.

Yahoo! is a massively powerful and influential media portal. It owns the email space - 250 million people with a Yahoo mail account. It innovates in vertical niches like Yahoo! Finance. And as Kara says in her article, it’s still not too late for Semel to go out and get the deal done with that pimply faced upstart Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook.

God help us if Microsoft end up with it. I doubt it. Ballmer probably wouldnt put up with Zuckerberg’s antics (and anyway, I dont reckon Microsoft would know what to do with it).

Kara Swisher’s article finishes with this…

Yahoo has to be relevant to each and every one of its users and that means letting them pick and choose any Yahoo product, even if it is not branded that way. Think Flickr (that was a terrific move) and you have the right idea.

Use whatever analogy you want, but there’s more than one person saying that Yahoo! needs to stop looking over it’s shoulder. It’s time for it as a company to step up and take some risks, focus on the user base and if a change in leadership is going to happen, then the existing board needs to have the guts and make it happen quickly.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, April 28th, 2007 at 1:40 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.