Bartz is Nobody’s Fool

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz was smart to enter into a search deal with Microsoft. Many observers seem to believe that Microsoft pulled a fast one on the ailing Web pioneer. Make no mistake, Yahoo is in trouble. That’s exactly why they need to focus on their core competency.

Search has never been Yahoo’s competitive advantage, and no matter how hard they’ve worked to catch up to Google, they haven’t had the muscle for it. Microsoft, on the other hand, has been trying for years to take down Google in search. In Bing they finally have a search product that isn’t embarrassing by comparison to Google. Leveraging Microsoft search technology will help Yahoo keep its customers happy without draining resources at Yahoo that should be directed at doing what they do best.

Microsoft has failed time and time again on the human side of the Web. Content is just not their bag. Social applications are not their bag. Yahoo does both of these quite well. Google’s mathematical, reductionist, relentlessly quantified search is not the only route to money. Bartz gets this.

Mark your calendars and come back in a year to taunt me if I’m wrong on this one. I definitely seem to be outnumbered, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the wisdom of the crowds prevailed. Still, I think that by shedding old baggage, a leaner, more capable Yahoo could emerge.

Another Windows Media Music Service Dies

SpiralFrog just died. What’s a SpiralFrog, you ask? SpiralFrog is, or was, an ad-supported online music service that never really caught on. It had a limited selection of music and relied on Windows Media DRM. SpiralFrog joins Ruckus on the scrapheap of history. Ruckus relied on… wait for it… Windows Media DRM.

Back in November, 2007 I wrote a post for TechLaw Forum, examining the state of online music innovation and DRM. At the time, Ruckus and SpiralFrog were upstarts. Yahoo Music (yet another user of Windows Media DRM) hadn’t gone dark yet, but was preparing to do so. Napster was suffering from declining membership numbers. Apple’s iTunes was shedding DRM, albeit slowly. Amazon’s DRM-free MP3 store was just gathering steam.

Since then Ruckus, SpiralFrog, and Yahoo Music all bit the dust. Napster had been using Windows Media DRM, but they switched to a DRM-free approach. Apple has excised DRM from its massive music catalog, Amazon’s MP3 store continues to do well, and Napster is still in the game.

What many pundits missed during all this was that all DRM is not created equal. Windows Media DRM was always a bad choice, given that the iPod, the global favorite for portable music playback, wasn’t supported by the technology. Amazingly enough, the biggest competitor to the iPod, Microsoft’s own Zune, wasn’t supported either. People were willing to put up with Apple’s FairPlay DRM because the limitations it imposed were long-term, but they did not interfere with the ability to seamlessly move music from computer to iPod.

This is an execution thing. Apple recognized that in order to get record labels on board with iTunes, it would need to use DRM. So it created a form of DRM that stayed out of your face. For the vast majority of customers, the DRM never made an appearance as music moved from computer to iPod. This was not the case with Windows Media DRM. Review after review of the now defunct services powered by that technology showed that the implementation was nowhere near as seamless as Apple’s implementation.

Microsoft built its DRM for all possible business models, but without support for the number one and number two portable music devices. Obviously portability matters. Microsoft gambled that it could get by without support for the iPod, and the online music services that relied on Windows Media DRM paid the price for that decision.

Image Credit: XPRS CATO! by Steve Jurvetson. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License. What a shot!

Yahoo’s Rebuild of Delicious Late but Good

Yahoo acquired the social bookmarking service del.icio.us two and a half years ago, and essentially let it lie dormant. Yesterday the company rolled out a thoroughly overhauled del.icio.us, and the results are marvelous. If you have heard of del.icio.us but were put off by the austere interface and geeky URL, now is the time to give it a try. Check it out at the new and much less offputting delicious.com address.

Let Us Not Speak Too Harshly of Yahoo

My friend Charles writes:

Boy, there’s just a sort of background hum in everything about getting too big and trying to be too many things.

IBM was crushed in the 80s and had to reinvent itself.

Microsoft looks like a utility that occasionally tries to dress up for the ball and ends up wearing last year’s Prada knock-off from the Dress Barn.

AOL was so ahead of the curve back in the day that it ran itself into a ditch.

Sun was the backbone. Now, it’s a cup of coffee.

Yahoo opened the door to wasting your whole life online until Google made general portals irrelevant.  (We waste away, all the same.)

Facebook and MySpace have the kids enthralled, but it still feels like kid stuff.

Apple looks like a juggernaut today, but….

So let us not badmouth the Yahoos of the world too much.  In their day, they rocked.  Now, they’re rolled.