Can Yahoo Pull an Apple-Like Upset?
If I were to pick a company that might be able to steal the market — one that had as little chance as Apple did at the beginning of the decade and yet surprise us all at the end — it would be Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO). It could easily be a battle over content rather than devices, and Yahoo is an Internet publishing company. However, failure doesn’t naturally breed success. To make this happen, Yahoo would need a visionary CEO who had a clear grasp of where to take the company. Carol Bartz is no Steve Jobs. I’ve been watching Yahoo closely of late, and I don’t think it actually knows, at an executive level, what business it’s in yet. If it did, it would be moving to aggregate the social networking sites around it and moving on opportunities to stand out, rather than behaving like it’s somehow in the packaged software business. If there were an iPod-like opportunity, Bartz likely wouldn’t even see it — and the chance of such an opportunity even happening once is slim.
