I'm baffled by:
- The new Yahoo! Bookmarks, which doesn't integrate with del.icio.us
- Yahoo! Photos, which doesn't interface with Flickr
- Yahoo! Maps Beta vs. Yahoo! "Driving Directions"
- Ask Yahoo! vs. Yahoo! Answers
- Geocities vs. 360
Granted, Google and MSN have fairly diverse and eclectic properties under their control, but Yahoo! really seems to be the only one who regularly compete with themselves.
Yeah, if the user uses one or the other - aren't they still your user? I think that Yahoo is playing the best game of their life right now (depsite what their stock says). They have a telanted group of developers hell bent on not only catching up with Google, but surpassing Google in every way imageinable.
It's kinda like they want to dominate the serps except in a different way. They're doing it with their services instead :)
G-Man
Mr. Thompson, your faith in Yahoo is quite astounding.
They need to hire someone from SEOMoz to make Yahoo #1 for "search engines" in yahoo. https://www.idealwebtools.com/blog/msn-sick/ , this is a small analysis of how different search engine behaves.
This is really fantastic. The unlimited access makes it even better
But Rand, as a good business model:
if someone is going to take away your business, who better to do it then yourself?
Maybe this...well just MAYBE, Yahoo! is using that business model..
Two different products serve two different purposes, perhaps? Millions of users are worth Yahoo's babysitting efforts: retain them, educate them, and eventually, switch them to the new service.
PS: Audis start leaking after 3 years.
So do Volkswagens ;)
Don't get me started on Volkswagens. I drive a bitchin' '91 Passat station wagon (starving student, indeed), and that piece of crap has screwed me over time and time again. I can't wait until I'm rid of it. After that, it's no more Volkswagens for me.
Sometimes I swear you read my mind Rand.. LOL, and that's a scary thing!
I was uploading to flick this morning, then read the thing on the bookmarks and thought - what the heck is de.licio.us then? and what about yahoo photos compared to flickr?
Yahoo's got great products, but why do they shoot themselves in the foot this way?
I agree - internal competition is good. Someone interviewed VW's chairman, and asked him why he was trying to make expensive VW's when they already owned Audi. He said that having the two brands compete against each other stimulated them both to improve.
Actually, I always wondered why Yahoo dumped the Overture brand.
Didn't the Phaeton confuse customers and sell horribly?
Keep in mind that Yahoo has so millions of existing users for most of these services. Switching all of the existing users to the "web 2.0" services would confuse most of the users. So one why to avoid an all or nothing senario is to offer multiple choices. Competion and choices are generally good things in my book.
Regarding delicious I would ask why hasn't yahoo fixed the search facility. Ever noticed how dreadfully slow the search engine on delicious is?
It makes no sense to leave it this they way when yahoo has one of the best search platforms on the planet.
Maybe this is why Google has been so successful and Yahoo (as of late) hasn't. A single Google Account has the ability to do pretty much anything (including cooking dinner).
I find really confusing what you are pointing out. Realy hard to understand the meaning behind their doings. My guess would be that you can't move users to quick from one plattform to the other and so they are developing both and harmonizing them only very slowly. Also during this trasition phase where you have two teams working on similar problems the flow of ideas and opportunities might be better so there is a bigger probability that one of the teams find the killer app like edge to the resprective business model.
I agree with you except for Flickr. As a avid Flickr user I feel that it has already grown very big and is no longer like when and why Flickr was started, as a place where photo enthusiasts can share and comment on photography.