Interesting analysis of Yahoo’s potential in the mounting battle for developer mindshare. Yahoo has a strong history of popular APIs for devs, but can they seriously regain the momentum now being consumed by iPhone/Pad, Android, and the plethora of other attractive platforms. This observation strikes a chord:
“Last year Bartz vented to me about Yahoo’s infrastructure problems – the company, she explained, was a compilation of fundamentally disconnected vertical silos, each with its own P&L, codebase, infrastructure, and culture. It was nearly impossible to roll out products that cut across, say, Mail, Homepage, Finance, IM, Search, and Flickr, because each instance required custom integration and coding. Yahoo was literally broken underneath, even as it looked consistent at the UI layer.”
via Yahoo Could Be A Big Winner In The Battle For Developers.
interesting piece, but personally, i’m skeptical. it’s not clear, from the outside anyway, that Yahoo knows precisely what it wants to be, and what its core mission is. for better or for worse, virtually every competitor of Yahoo’s has at least that part figured out.
add in the fact that its acquisition track record is actually worse than Google’s – no mean feat, that – with many in the startup and developer community actively hostile towards the brand, and they have a challenge in front of them. neutrality or no.
they have some interesting pieces, certainly, but the big picture questions are, well, big.
They had a good eye in the early Web 2.0 days with the acquisition of Flickr and Delicious, but none of that seemed to integrate into the core portal. Time was when you were a “Yahoo person” or a “Google person” in terms of email, calendar, portal … but the forays into entertainment, the loss of direction under Semel and the new hard-assed approach of Carol Bartz — I don’t know. I don’t develop, but when it came time to build Lenovo’s platform for its Olympic sponsorship, Yahoo was not on the list, despite their excellent work for FIFA with the 2006 world cup.