I’ve wondered off and on about how much a company’s culture is modified in its CEO’s image. (It’s a heavily-researched issue, but I haven’t read up on any of it). There is evidence galore about Jack Welch’s effect on GE’s culture, Steve Jobs’ on Apple’s, and Clinton’s on the U.S.

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In a post several days ago , I had predicted that Yahoo! would sooner or later get out of the search business and concentrate on Community (since that’s what it is best at) and Personalization, which follows from the community focus. Read more

I’ve been thinking of the difference (and similarities) between Y! Answers and Wikipedia, and then about Yahoo!’s true strength. Excerpts from an email I wrote a friend:

… if you can get inputs from not only patients, but medical practitioners, medical students, this could be huge. There are innumerable startups out there trying to build up a comprehensive directory of medical knowledge - the Answers model could complement a static medical database by being a naturally up-to-date, action-oriented database.

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Bob Cringely contends that the battle for search is over, with Google emerging the clear winner. With Google Universal Search, Google has put so much distance between itself and numbers two and three, that the incremental return on additional investment into search by either Yahoo! or Microsoft will be negative. Both firms will be better off putting their money in other lines of business.Why has GUS ended the search wars? Apart from standard Web Search, Google’s also ruled vertical search - maps, books, images, and video. (The only exception was news, where Y! did a better job.) So if Y! and MS were to follow suit with their own integrated searches, the top video (or book) results would be on Google’s properties. In fact, the better they made their searches, the more traffic they’d drive to YouTube or books.google.com! Not only does Google do the best job with vertical search, today it also owns the properties where this vertical content resides!

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