Jerry Yang offers sneak peak of Yahoo's future: Life!
Yahoo co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang made his inaugural CES appearance, outlining how he plans to evolve his company ahead of the curve and to become an indispensable starting point for consumers' Web experience, which has become richer and more complex over the last decade.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is Jerry Yang's first public platform pitch since he took over as CEO in June 2007, after months of questions inside and outside the company about where Yahoo heads next. The October coverage already showed the thesis forming — incremental product wins bearing fruit and an open invitation to outside developers — and CES is where it gets a name: Yahoo! Life! and Go 3.0, with any developer or advertiser able to build widgets for Yahoo's surfaces.
The story traveled unusually wide on day one — ReadWriteWeb ran two separate takes, and Tech Trader Daily and the NYT's Bits blog both picked up the widgets-and-mobile angle — while pundit chatter about Yahoo as an acquisition target (unconfirmed, and priced out of most buyers at its roughly $33.5 billion market cap) hangs over the appearance. A report that Yahoo was building its own phone was denied.
First-order effects
- Third-party developers and advertisers gain direct distribution onto Yahoo's desktop and mobile properties through Go 3.0 widgets, making Yahoo's audience addressable without a Yahoo deal per feature.
- Yahoo's newly unveiled mobile ad strategy puts it head-to-head with Google and Microsoft for the growing cellphone advertising business right now.
Second-order effects
- Rival portals and search engines face pressure to match the open-widgets model or cede the 'indispensable starting point' position Yang is claiming, turning platform openness into competitive table stakes.
- Advertisers get a new mobile inventory channel outside the Google-Microsoft duopoly, which should sharpen pricing competition in early cellphone ads.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, portals stop competing on owned content and start competing as aggregation layers where third-party widgets plug in — a structural shift from destination to platform.
- The mobile ad push signals that the next portal battleground is the handset, not the browser, with whoever controls mobile starting points controlling the richer, more complex Web experience Yang describes.
The trend: Consumer web portals are remaking themselves as open widget platforms to defend their role as the Web's starting point against search engines and the shift of attention to mobile.