One month ago I attended the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco when John Battelle interviewed Jeff Weiner, EVP, Network Division of Yahoo! The company has been under pressure for the last years for losing ground towards Google and so has been its CEO Terry Semel in a recent “Face Falue”-article in The Economist (subscription required).:
Of late, however, Mr Semel has been taken aback by the astonishing rise of Google, which today dominates the market for web-search and keyword-related advertising, having left Yahoo! far behind. His fate at Yahoo! now depends on whether it can catch up with its more agile rival.
Yahoo! has been coming traditionally from another angle, rather trying to fish in the media pond with getting into proprietary content. A strategy which does not scale that well compared to Google’s algorithm-driven model. Furthermore, Google’s advertising systems AdWords and AdSense have been outpeforming the one of Yahoo! Recently, the latter is placing its bets on the new system of its own Panama.
Google has kept to its mission statement for the last few years:
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
What makes Jeff Weiner’s task indeed exciting is to stitch together the various assets Yahoo! indeed possesses into one seamless user experience, especially leveraging social components where the company which has acquired among others Flickr is stronger than its archrival. Hence, Mr. Weiner has refined the mission statement for his responsibility:
To connect people to their passions, communities, and the world’s knowledge.
CXertainly not just one of the typical closing lines “it remains to be seen” (*yawn*), but it will truly be very interesting to see where those two companies are going to stand in, say, two years from now given the mindblowing pace of the industry.
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