Yahoo! and Alibaba. Who is buying who? II

One year ago I wrote a post called Yahoo! and Alibaba. Who is buying who? I had always thought that Mr. Ma dreamed about having a strong business presence in the US, but in the past he had to confront too many internal battles in the Alibaba Group and they kept him from focusing his attention on the Yahoo! acquisition opportunity.

Alibaba and Yahoo! have different business models, but they can be 100% complementary. Yahoo! is a huge opportunity for all the big internet companies. Amazon, Google, Facebook, eBay, Microsoft and Alibaba dream about adding Yahoo's Internet traffic to their online advertising inventories. But how is it possible a deal hasn't been done yet? Only Microsoft bet seriously on Yahoo! and that was two years ago.

Many issues chez Yahoo! Lack of leadership, sophisticated shareholder relations, pending issues in Asia, that now finally have been resolved, etc. But where do all these things come from? That is the question that stands out when looking at other Internet companies. We know that Jerry Yang is at Yahoo!, but where is David Filo? I have a very particular point of view about Yahoo!'s decline: they went east! The opposite of what Facebook did: they went west!

New York City and Time's Square are the best places to sell your advertising inventory to agencies and big companies, that is, to increase sales and revenue. But it is not the place to have your headquarters. Google has always understood this: Headquarters in Silicon Valley and a huge sales office in the heart of Manhattan. When Yahoo! moved from Silicon Valley in the early 2000s they lost their DNA. Words like platform, SQL, redundance, distributed, mobile, simple or less where changed by words like strategy, colours, targets, deadlines, piece of the pie or market share. Yahoo! made an excellent transition from a technolgy company to a media company focused on a content delivery platform, but they lost their soul doing that. And without soul, there is no mission, no vision, no leadership. There is only inertia. And that is why a deal hasn't been done until now. Will Mr. Ma bring his soul to Yahoo!?


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