Are You Googling on Yahoo?
July 25th, 2006
Written By: Adam Sussman
One of our party guests at the Hawaiian Luau said something to me which had me cracking up. I was just reminded of this when I was reading Will Yahoo! Shares Bounce Back? Now, mind you it was 2am and I should say I had been running on 6 hours of sleep for the past 3 days and I was also working on my 8th frozen Chi-Chi Cocktail.
So, this guest was an MBA Student and their class had recently been discussing the fall of Yahoo’s shares. As soon as she found out I was in the Internet business she jumped at the opportunity to ask me what I thought about all of this. They were expected to come up with a thorough analysis and explain to the class their findings.
She excitedly talked to me about Market Cap, Price to Earning Ratio’s, Volume and a bunch of other fundamentals which really was the last thing I needed to be talking about at that moment. But I had to play the nice host and the things she was saying all sounded like very smart MBA stuff. So I let her explain to me what her findings were.
MBA students have an amazing ability to talk about very sophisticated things but typically miss the obvious.
In her speech to me about how wonderful Yahoo was and why the drop in share price made no sense she would also repeatedly say, “I much prefer to Google on Yahoo!”
So after a few more minutes of listening to her speak, I said
I am no expert in finance and everything your saying sounds really good but if I was to address your class I would not talk about Price to Earnings or Market Cap. I would not even address the topic of Yahoos Stock.
I would have to address the subject of what it means to the Search Market when smart MBA students are saying things like “I much prefer to Google on Yahoo!”
July 25th, 2006 14:22
It’s tough to walk the walk when you can’t even talk the talk.
July 25th, 2006 15:18
It is also funny to point out that back in the day when Yahoo served the Google index people would say that Google was better. Search quality has nothing to do with dominance at this point. Just like coke and pepsi. It has more to do with mind share than quality. Back in the day they did blind taste tests and Pepsi always one but they lost when people went to the store. So quality has nothing to do with it. Pepsi did take a lot of market share form coke from advertising but will never pass because coke is just older and has more mind share.
July 26th, 2006 16:40
That is very ironic (as David alluded to). I’d love to know how she uses Yahoo and what searches she does.
July 29th, 2006 05:29
It’s funny when drunk smart people make themselves look stupid. I had a similar situation recently with someone trying to tell me that google was a small company. They thought that google had maybe 20-30 employees and based this on the fact that googe’s sites were poorly designed. The funniest thing was that this person claimed to be a web designer / seo expert. I didn’t say anything.