Julian Hewett
Yahoo! Europe's vision
Yesterday, Yahoo Europe briefed the European analyst community for the first time. We were treated to presentations from six of the top team. The briefing itself was evidence that Yahoo! is taking Europe more seriously, after largely ignoring anything outside the US during the early 2000s. Comment: As appropriate for a media company, the presentations featured a battery of statistics. While Yahoo! is rarely best-of-breed in any one category or any one country, it argued that it comes top if you collectively combine all categories and all countries. Yahoo's vision is to become the default "front door" to the Internet - the place where you will perform your most essential daily tasks - rather pretentiously labelled your "life engine"! The four "pillars" that they hope will get them there are: community, personalisation search and content. And they are extending their footprint beyond PC browsers onto mobile and TV, starting with the recently-announced "Yahoo! Go" series of applets, so that you can reach your home page and content from anywhere. It's interesting that this "connected life" vision closely matches that of some integrated telcos (France Telecom's NExT strategy for example), minus the infrastructure of course. Clearly Yahoo would love to partner with more telcos. At the same time, Yahoo! recognises that it is vital to have some best-of-breed reasons to stay with it. Acquisition has been an important part of this, for example Kelkoo (shopping), Flickr (photo sharing) and del.icio.us (storing and sharing favourites). And we had some glimpses of fascinating new stuff. For example, "Yahoo! Answers" (answers.yahoo.com in beta in the US) aims to encourage other users to answer your questions, tapping into that human desire to offer advice to others. And (as a frustrated musician) I'm going to try out their personalised music site. Because of this emphasis on applications, Yahoo! Europe has been reorganised. Its European operations are now dominated by functional business units rather than country operations (following that usual to-and-fro cycle that all companies - even Ovum - seem to follow!). Interestingly (from a telecoms point of view), voice (VoIP) was not mentioned during the entire morning, and the speakers struggled to answer questions on the topic. Voice is very clearly just an add-on rather than a priority in the Yahoo! world. Full marks for the vision. But, in my view, this is a highly risky strategy. On Wednesday, in an interview with the Financial Times, eBay CEO Meg Whitman forecast that the portal market will shake out into a few leaders in each major area - Amazon for shopping, Google for search, Yahoo! for content and of course eBay for trading. In other words, a "best-of-breed" future. Whereas Yahoo!'s vision is more one of trying to be everything to everyone. Fantastic if it works. But given how dynamic the Internet is, a very tough promise to fulfil. Oh, and it will have to beat Microsoft and Google along the way.
