I saw this noted at Steve Rubel’s Micro Persuasion Blog. According to an article syndicated by Bloomberg, Yahoo’s CFO Susan Decker said that Yahoo does not have a goal of being the number one search engine.
I just have to say, it’s a stupid thing to say. Even if they believed that they could not match Google in terms of market share, Yahoo should still strive to be number one in terms of quality. To just give up like that really doesn’t make sense. What makes it even more stupid is that Decker stated that they’d be happy to stay at their current level of market share. Well, how do they expect to maintain market share now that they’ve admitted they suck and that they don’t even have any plans of trying to do as well as Google? Why would they expect people to come back to their site when they’re searching for something when that’s their attitude?
Exactly what business is Yahoo! in anyway? It makes me wonder. Clearly they don’t consider themselves a search company. They do a lot more than that. Google is going that direction as well. I think it’s easy for a giant like Yahoo! to get lost, to lose its personality. What are they good at? Anything? They try to do so many things that perhaps they suck at everything. It’s just the massive amounts of traffic to their site keeping them alive at all. When you’re a small business, on the other hand, it’s absolutely critical to be able to effectively define yourself. A small business could never afford to let it be known that they do not aspire to be the best in category. Time will show how will it affect Yahoo!