Google's Take on Yahoo? Chopped Liver

Anyone catch the back-handed insult Google tossed at its Silicon Valley neighbor and fellow global Internet behemoth Yahoo! today?  Google said it considers its competition to be...Microsoft, a company that has run a distant third in the web wars for a decade.  Meanwhile, not so much as a mention of the second-largest Internet player in the world.

Comments

[Jake]

Hi Henry!

It's fascinating that not much more is made of the fact that Yahoo isn't exactly a smallish company slowly dying in a corner somwhere, but is in fact a rather large company that could be a whole lot bigger.

See also an interesting story on MarketWatch that argues that Google today is in the position that Yahoo was in 2001... sobering...

http://www.marketwatch.com/News/Story/Story.aspx?guid=%7B2A225D76%2D3A38%2D4B46%2DA6BB%2D0B5DE937CC27%7D&siteid=mktw&dist=

[Niki Scevak]

Isn't it more a function of who said it and their personal ego? Schmidt was crushed by MSFT while at Sun.

And to to the contrary, I'm sure Yahoo are happy. Schmidt concentrating on a whale beached on the online advertising sands would suit them fine, I would think. Bill Gates himself always had it right, when he said that the competitor he worried most about was two kids in a garage. Shouldn't this answer be written into every management guide to PR and competition questions?

[CorpDevDude]

I was in a meeting with Eric Schmidt and Larry about 9 months ago. We asked him their view of competition with Yahoo!. His answer: "We're friends with Yahoo. We understand who they are and what their ambitions are."

My take (after spending 2 years as an exec at Yahoo). Beware of public statements. Make no mistake - the product teams at GOOG and YHOO track eachother's moves daily.

YHOO delivered almost all of the traffic to GOOG in it's early days. W/O that deal, GOOG may have never gotten off the ground. And w/o that deal, YHOO would have never improved it's search service to the degree it's has.

Also, given that many of the key engineers and product people at GOOG were previously at YHOO (and there are more than a few GOOG/YHOO marriages as well), it's easier to demonize MSFT publicly than pick a holy war in your backyard.

I'd also note that although both YHOO and GOOG are fiece competitors (even if they don't admit it publicly), they never believed that the market is a zero sum game - As a monopolist, MSFT sees the world differently.

[Bjorn]

It could also be an indication of where Google is headed. They might see Microsoft as their number one competitor because they're headed for releasing an office productivity suite, a browser, or attacking the desktop application paradigm in general by concentrating on web based applications that replace the costly behemoths that are Microsoft's cash cows.

[Stuart MacDonald]

I soooo totally agree with CorpDevDude on this one, in every way. Nicely said. It's like earnings calls - it's often a game of "Hey batter - Look over here!" To wit: my chuckling at Expedia's Q4 performance. On the call they did this whole "Europe is the problem" thing. Well, check their cost increases and their cratering US reach, and the fact that European revenue is *tiny* and it's pretty clear it's not.

Truth lives Behind The Curtain. Never forget it.

-- Stuart

[Tel Aviv]

As An online marketing i can see that there are less searches in yahoo than we got a year ot two years ago, however yahoo is getting more and more non search traffic that seems to be much more stable than just search only. Yahoo is now a diversified company - google is a one product comapany as long as this product works fine... but ...