Microsoft dropped their offer, Is Yahoo doomed to mediocrity? search results are awful, YPN sucks, social networking experiment MASH stinks, etc..
I think so, you can have the greatest technology in the world when it comes to search but if you don't have the data the technology is worthless.
Yahoo is a great brand. However, monetizing their ad inventory (from the content divisions) is a lot harder than what Google is doing through search. Yahoo is certainly not a one trick pony, which sometimes hurt their strengths.
Given the failure of the Microsoft deal, I suspect they have a lot of problems at the boardroom level. Yahoo was a great brand, but they seem to be on the way out. Their move to Google ads just made no sense, and it smacks of desperation.
yahoo will continue to lose market share. I predict they will have a whopping EIGHT PERCENT of the US search market in two more years. Combined with MSN, they will have a humongous 12% of US search in the year 2010 (the year Bill Gates completes his purchase of yahoo for a whopping 5 billion, 10% of his original offer).
Hardly, they own some of the most popular web real estate on the net. Yes they are trumped in the search market by Google, but their inventory is massive.
That's what I think. Because even Microsoft wouldn't have offered so much if there was no real potential. It's almost certain that Microsoft has a secret team working on improvements to Yahoo, even if the deal was to fall-through. Much of this may all hinge upon what their stock value does in the next few weeks or months, and how much stock holders start saying one way or another.
They are doomed! Microsoft should take the money they were prepared to pay for Yahoo and improve their own model and they will crush Yahoo. As another pointed out their SERPs suck, their PPC traffic is garbage, may they go down in flames. All the stupid decisions they have made in the last few years are coming to bite them in the arse.
Really dont think that Yahoo is mediocre by any means.... they are damn good... hence they are NUMBER 2.
How is that improving, it may help there bottom line, but its not going to bring visitors from google to them.
Like heavyweight championship fighting. At least in this case, the offer value for Yahoo shows that there is a valuable number two in this industry. Amazingly, even Ask and Alexa hang on.
Yahoo is doomed to fail. It as peaked on price and the stocks and market share for searches will drop.
As far as search is concerned, it is hard for Yahoo, but their portal is their strength, it might be smart to use Google for search and adverts and to draw the traffic to Yahoo, it can be a Win Win situation provided Yahoo played its cards well to avoid being overwhelm by Google.