I think it's obvious that Yahoo! needs some serious internal "disruption." I think the biggest thing they need is relevance. Incremental improvements to their search, email, etc I don't think will matter. If Yahoo's search started being 5% better than Google, by whatever metric you prefer, would anyone really care? I would still use Google. I think in many consumer's view, and even probably many of us, we have all just been wondering when this all Yahoo! thing was going to end, whether was from a buyout by MS or whatever. They need some kind of breakout product, surely they know this but we've been waiting for awhile now. Honestly, I think it's got to be something more than just acquisition. Honestly, just now I visited yahoo.com, (not yahoo answers or any of that, the homepage), I haven't done that in years. I'll say this, it's a strange place.
Just to name a few: on the consumer side, Yahoo! is remarkably good at Sports including Fantasy Football and Baseball, and on the technical side it's remarkably good at Hadoop.
It does an okay job with Hadoop. Parts of Hadoop are good (Zookeeper) and parts of it are well short of the mark (HDFS) and ought to have had more effort behind it years ago.
> Incremental improvements to their search, email, etc I don't think will matter. If Yahoo's search started being 5% better than Google, by whatever metric you prefer, would anyone really care? I would still use Google.
Yup, that's the issue. I actually tried Bing on a search this week - I was pretty surprised to see it returned better results, faster, than Google. But I still use Google like everyone else. Google owns that market, like Microsoft owns the desktop.
> They need some kind of breakout product
I hope Marissa already had a plan for what that would be before starting. Without such a product, I doubt Yahoo will survive.
Bing is still missing some ridiculously elementary features, like Google's "Past week" / "Past 24 hours" / "Past hour" menu. When I look up an error message, I don't want to see what caused it 3 years ago in an obsolete version of my OS.
