Om blogs about Yahoo’s recent stock crisis.
Yahoo’s modest financial performance in the fourth quarter of 2005 prompted a quick sell-off, and already the second largest search engine is down 10% for the day.
If I had the money (it’s currently being invested in TailRank) I’d be buying Yahoo stock. Why?
Two main reasons.
1. Google isn’t scaling their engineering. They’re hiring too fast and this will become more of a problem as the company gets bigger. Yahoo’s already been there. Want proof? Witness Google Anayltics and the Google Web Accelerator. Both sub-par products to say the least.
2. Yahoo is geared up to take Google on in Q2 and Q3 assuming they don’t squander their recent Web 2.0 acquisitions.
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January 18, 2006 at 10:13 pm
Kevin,
I think you’re spot on with this one. Even though Analytics is at its core a great product, its massive launch hiccup drove me crazy. And the list of engineering-challenged recent products from the big G is very, very long. Web Accelerator, GBase, Talk, Video search, blog search, etc. They have genius talent there and a great business, but…? I even hear rumblings of discontent from some of their recent wins, such as GMail and Maps.
Y! is nobody’s fool and a very strong contender. This is a fascinating horse race from a Valley perspective, and a giant win for consumers, because there’s no quarter or slack given.
January 19, 2006 at 11:42 am
Totally agree here, and would actually really strongly point to their Video Marketplace as another underengineered product. This wasn’t a soft, beta rollout, this was a hard-launched commerce product, and had both scale and usability issues. It really was the first major let down of a revenue product that they’ve had. I agree that it can be attributed to their meteoric growth rate, and hope they can take the edge off that, possibly by doing more partnerships and/or bringing in more autonomous teams, i.e. Blogger. Obviously, having all of GYM operating at a really high level is good for everyone.
January 19, 2006 at 4:03 pm
Umm, I want to agree with you, I really do (huge y! fan), but have you ever tried running an ad campaign on Google and Overture? It’s a joke how painful Overture is to use. I intentionally write Overture and not Y! because even though y! bought the company two years ago it seems as if there’s been zero development since then. It’s as if they are purposely making it hard for me to spend money on their site.
January 19, 2006 at 10:19 pm
Overture is a piece of crap. I would LOVE to give Yahoo! more money, but they make it so damn hard to do! Idiots!! I am spending $2k a day in Google and would give an equal amount to Yahoo! if Overture wasn’t such a turd to use. There must be hundreds of thousands of other people like me, think of that uncaptured revenue…
January 20, 2006 at 9:22 am
Overture *is* extremely painful, but at least their advertiser backend has SOME kind of context to it. Adwords is still a friggin dartboard, and that totally plays to Google making more money and advertisers being more in the dark. We all know they have very specific target data, they just refuse to share that with advertising partners (except, I’m going to assume, the big boys)