Actually, I would have made the title of this post into something like, “Yahoo calls the people for help to save itself from getting eaten up by Microsoft”. But then I realized I may be a bit too harsh for both Yahoo and Microsoft.Anyway, we all know Yahoo’s initiatives towards the open web, and Yahoo has just given it a branding and decided that the Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS) sounds good, and so Y!OS was launched. But don’t let it fool you into thinking that this is something new. Like I said, we’ve heard about Yahoo’s effort to jump in to the OS bandwagon, like everybody else.
But with Y!OS, Yahoo hopes to attract more developers, users, media blitz and what-have-yous, with the overarching goal of regaining its status as a major internet player. And eventually merits a higher price from Microsoft.
And Yahoo’s opening salvo for its entry into the open web is through its major product which is Yahoo search. Yahoo, through its newly launched SearchMonkey developer platform, hopes to empower Yahoo search users into creating a search result page for their sites specific advantages. Yahoo SearchMonkey is the Yahoo pipes of Yahoo’s search engine results. Whether this would gather enough interest from users remains to be seen. But what we should all anticipate and watch out for is whether this SearchMonkey would boost Yahoo search engine’s performance and current standing in the search engine market. Could the monkey pull one off over the Godzilla of web search? In all honesty, I really hope so.
