IP Democracy: Yahoo Likes Its Creative Chaos

Like many folks, James Fallows has never really “got” Yahoo or what it does, a curious reaction to a company as big and powerful as Yahoo. In an article for the New York Times, Fallows walks through the seeming hodge-podge of Yahoo properties and notes at the outset that Yahoo likes its far-flung businesses and doesn’t care to be easily characterized the way Amazon.com, eBay or even Google is. Moreover, while Google is always considered to be the chief rival of Yahoo, Yahoo isn’t trying to emulate Google.

…while Yahoo is ever conscious of Google and determined to match it head to head in familiar keyword search, in the long run its plans for search seem quite different from Google’s. The other is that Yahoo views the very scale and sprawl of its operations - the seemingly random assemblage of sites and functions, the 200 million active users in more than 20 countries - as a crucial competitive advantage.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on November 5, 2005 9:49 PM to IP Democracy