{{ http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2214/2234037367_2a77f57641_m.jpg|Microsoft’s hostile takeover bid}}

It would be sad if the merger/acquisition does go through (which I think it will, eventually). Meanwhile, while the long drawn battle plays itself out, I can’t help but wonder why Y! failed to leverage some of its really valuable assets. Honestly, some of their assets have incredible value in them. To some extent I do blame the media (or Yahoo’s PR). I don’t believe that Google does //all// the innovation, nor that all their products are superior to the competition. But still, even if someone in Google sneezes, it gets Dugg and Slashdotted and every one just goes hyper. In this post I’ll discuss some of these issues.

First off, some of the good stuff (I’m not going to mention the usual suspects like Y’s traffic numbers or their share in the web-mail and IM markets):

* Yahoo! is a major supporter and contributor in [[http://hadoop.apache.org|Hadoop]]: an open source implementation of [[http://google.com|Google's]] [[wp>MapReduce|MapReduce]]. Complaints of Yahoo playing catch up and “too little too late” apart (I will address them in another post), I do think this is a timely and much needed development, both for Yahoo and the industry in general. A cursory look at the [[http://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/PoweredBy|list of places using Hadoop]] is enough to give an idea of the kind of enabler this platform is. An entire community and several other projects are mushrooming around Hadoop including [[http://hadoop.apache.org/hbase/|HBase]], [[http://incubator.apache.org/pig/|Pig]] (bad name if you ask me) and [[http://hypertable.org/|Hypertable]]. Google might have the largest, most efficient MapReduce and BigTable implementations, but their implementations are just that — theirs, and extremely closely coupled to their infrastructure. Opening up such a platform for others and building a healthy community around it is I think a Good Thing.
* Yahoo! Developer Network: This crew has churned out some remarkable products (such as [[http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/|YUI]] and [[http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/|YSlow]]) as well as some really well organized guidelines (such as [[http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/|the Design Pattern library]]).
* [[http://finance.yahoo.com/|Finance]]: the [[http://finance.google.com|competition]] is not even close.
* Flickr and Del.icio.us
* [[http://mobile.yahoo.com|Yahoo! Mobile]]: I have yet to get on the mobile Internet bandwagon, so I really have no first hand experience here. But I’ve heard that Yahoo products have much better support across a wide variety of devices compared to the competition. In fact, until the Java based GMail reader came out, the mobile version of GMail’s web interface was quite lacking.

That said, I feel there are two main areas Y! needs to work on if they want to get back in the game:
* Brand image: Y! needs to work on how they are perceived //externally// as well as //internally//. I feel that people who work at Y! themselves don’t believe in the company, or have the feeling it is somehow not as good as or not as cool as other companies. A lot of Google’s brand image comes from the attitude of its employees, and the work culture. Ditto for Microsoft.
* Streamlined products: Yahoo! Maps and Mail are good applications, but they are far too bloated. Even on my reasonably powerful dual-core desktop, these applications feel sluggish and drive the CPU to saturation which is just not acceptable. In comparison, offerings from Google feel much leaner, load quicker and are more responsive.

In the end, the company that remains competitive and offers the best value to its customers and shareholders will prevail. And I feel that a combined Microsoft-Yahoo entity will not make the space any more interesting. On the other hand (as many fear) I think it might kill and certainly slow down innovation that might otherwise have happened. If Yahoo! can somehow manage to stay afloat on its own, it will at least be a little more exciting. So come on Yahoo! dikha de (translates to “show us”)!!

The first thing that caught my eye was the [[http://riya.com/corp/team.jsp|predominantly Indian staff]]. Not only that, almost 70% of the development is [[http://munjal.typepad.com/recognizing_deven/2005/11/correction.html|happening back in India]]. Also interesting to note is that there are no fresh out of college or even experienced IIT graduates (or even RECs, as far as I could tell) on their team. //For these new age jobs, people are not running after IITians, and IMHO this is a **GoodThing** (TM)//.

The second interesting aspect is the product itself. It has all the qualities of a good venture — a timely idea, a talented team (they have a whole bunch of PhDs, one of them from UCSD/UIUC infact and they even mention David Kriegman — so I trust they really know what they’re talking about), and a hugely succesful (and probably not all intentional) marketing campaign. The idea is timely because indeed we have too many pictures and too little time to organize them. And as broadband takes over, we will be sharing more and more pictures. So it only makes sense to automate this process as much as possible, making use of collective efforts of thousands of users in the process (I tag a picture that has you in it, and voila, the system knows who you are).

The third interesting facet is all the rumors floating around about [[http://digg.com/search?search=riya+google&submit=Submit|Google acquiring Riya]]. And bear in mind, that all this buzz is around a company that has barely launched, and has not even released an alpha yet!!! Clearly, something is going on here. From a strategic viewpoint, it seems to me that Riya is valuable for Yahoo! and Google both. For Google, it will be a good chance to create a niche in probably the only area of web services where Yahoo’s presence is far more dominating than Google’s — online image management (Yahoo owns Flickr).

I’m surprised and somewhat disappointed that I’m not hearing any stories about Yahoo trying to outbid Google. Disappointed, because I think Riya makes more sense for Yahoo than it does for Google. Firstly, Yahoo already has an //enormous// collection of //tagged, categorized// pictures with loads and loads of other meta data (notes, comments) on them. Is it really possible to get any better training data for Riya? And once they do have Riya, they can enhance flickr to no ends.

True, Google has a huge image database of its own. But its largely unstructured, and there’s hardly any meta data to go along with it. And its not going to be easy to convince people who have spent money and //huge// amounts of effort to move all their snaps from flickr and retag them in Riya. The client software itself is irrelevant — once you have the APIs in place, the client software will build itself. Look at flickr — there is built in flickr support in all good photo management apps (iPhoto, f-spot, digikam? etc), plugins for all good content management systems and so on.

So Yahoo! if you are listening — go buy Riya!

> Microsoft and Yahoo are set to announce on Wednesday a blockbuster interoperability deal that will reshape the landscape of the fragmented instant messaging market. The companies will connect their IM networks so users on each can communicate with one another using text and voice chat free of charge.

I wonder how will AOL take this. As for me, I don’t particularly care. So long as [[http://kopete.kde.org|Kopete]] can handle everything, I’m not concerned.

However, as I have [[http://floatingsun.net/blog/2005/07/28/76/|mentioned before]] as well, my preferred network is Jabber. So far I have only been able to convert 3 people — Asim, Ragesh and Jaya — to Jabber, which is quite depressing given the number of people using Y! or MSN on my buddy list. Come on people! Help me out here. Go [[http://jabber.org|Jabber]].

[[http://zimbra.com|Zimbra]] is a desktop like web-based outlook replacement. Again, there is already a lot of competition in this arena (most notably, Microsoft’s Outlook Web Access and Yahoo’s upcoming redesign of the email interface). A more interesting news is the announced [[http://weblog.infoworld.com/techwatch/archives/004210.html|tie up between Google and Sun]] to develop a web based office app that would take on Microsoft Office.

A look at the list of sponsors of the Web2 con is a very good indication of the players in this field. My guess is that this entire Web2.0 thing will spawn off a whole bunch of startups that will (and are already) get consumed by the big players like Yahoo and Google.

If you recall, I had blogged about this in an earlier post, [[http://floatingsun.net/blog/2005/05/05/37/|the future of Google]].

Kottke.org does a good job of summarizing the recent developments (Konfabulator, GDS, Web 2.0, AJAX) and tying them all together into a big coherent picture.

I guess I should start putting in some more time into my posts :-)

Incidentally, [[http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/~vahdat/|Amin's]] thesis was on [[http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/~vahdat/papers/hpdc98.ps|WebOS]] too — the idea was close (operating system services over wide area networks), but the implementation was quite different.

So some folks from NCSA went ahead and did a little testing, and the conclusion is that Yahoo’s claims [[http://vburton.ncsa.uiuc.edu/indexsize.html|might be suspicious]]. Are we entering a new world of corporate dishonesty?

To be fair, the NCSA experiment was very very simplistic. I mean, you could do it from your home computer, if you wanted. They just took the standard ispell dictionary file, created around 10,000 random searches consisting of two words and fed them to both Yahoo and Google. Then they compared the size of the result set.

A few points to note — they only compare if the number of results is less than 1000. This can bias the result of their experiment if Google is simply //better// than Yahoo at indexing documents. Its still not a concrete measure of the size of the index itself. Also, their experiments cover regular queries — specialized queries for images, audio/video files, blogs etc are not covered.

But certainly something that Yahoo! is going to note and hopefully respond to in the next few days.