I agree about Yahoo ‘building knockoffs’ instead of smart acquisitions. I think they have made some lower dollar level such as mybloglog which are a step in the right direction. But as for big ideas.. they seem to have cement shoes.

John

yahoo seems to be pushing a strategy of mega content aggregation, as well as offering personalization, socialization, and other such services/tools to retain users on their pages. while google does offer similar personalization tools, they seem to regard them more as entrepreneurial experiments and their core search business is designed as a hit and run.

although they are online pioneers, yahoo is very reactive in the service space. if there is a myspace, yahoo develops their own knockoff version of it. meanwhile, google is growing new businesses the murdoch way, through smart acquisitions. yahoo\’s has had hits there too, though, such as flickr.

i wondered how wall street would react when yahoo announced the newspaper consortium deal. would investors and analysts find the equivalent of an online superstore of content attractive? seems like they have spoken for now, but time will tell if the long tail strategy and the megaaggregator strategy either compliment or conflict with each other.

as for the right now, clearly google is not so interested in making their own content, but they are very interested in helping you with yours. socially speaking, we all like people who offer us help, listen to us, and seem more interested in what we have to say than what they have to say. based on what we are seeing and hearing, google may be the most evolved and enlightened company from top to bottom, inside and out, anywhere in the world today.

both will have to adapt to each other.

the problem lies in where one typically either “does business” with the other or sues them if things don’t go their way.

i’ll let you decide to which i refer.