In all of the news about Apple and Google and Amazon.com and Microsoft, we forget the other players. The one that I am pondering is Yahoo.
Can Yahoo succeed in the new land of mobile/cloud computing?
People like Yahoo's products. It's e-mail and Flickr offerings are capable and reliable. (I use the "pro" versions of both, so I pay a nominal annual fee for them.)
But Yahoo's success has been on the web. Can it move to mobile/cloud?
One challenge for Yahoo will be living in the world of combined (or at least coordinated) hardware and software. Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon.com all sell solutions that encompass hardware and software, and this is re-enforced with the DRM-enabled walled garden for each. Yahoo's products live in the software realm, and Yahoo has no hardware to augment its offerings. (This may be a good thing. The market is crowded with iOS and Android devices, and even Microsoft is having a difficult time getting its Surface tablet into the market.)
Yahoo does partner with Microsoft for search -- Yahoo search is driven by Microsoft's Bing engine. But I think that Yahoo can survive with other areas.
Yahoo's biggest advantage may be its reputation. It doesn't have rabid followers like Apple or Microsoft; instead of fanboys it has what might be best described as a loyal following. Yahoo has been a quiet if not good member of the software world. It has not unsold books to people, or arbitrarily rejected applications, or treated developers poorly.
One person asked of Marissa Mayer: "Please, make Yahoo cool again." I agree. We need a company that makes computing cool. And Yahoo may just be the company that can do it.
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