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YAY FOR YAHOO | PAGE 1, 2,
Yes, that's true. But Yahoo, better than any other site, has managed to distill a tasty concoction of useful Web services without appearing to completely succumb to corporate sliminess. I know this is a controversial claim -- I've heard the arguments about how Yahoo doesn't catalog the small Web site with the same alacrity as the big, and certainly the plan to charge $199 for speedy listing of business sites is damning. But there are some arguments in its favor. Yahoo has fought its way onto center stage without making all the compromises that so many of its competitors have willingly agreed to or been forced to accept. Yahoo hasn't merged -- so far! -- with Disney, or NBC, or AOL, or Microsoft, or ATT/TCI. Yahoo is the Web's own local boy made good. Only Amazon can give it a run for the money as an example of a homegrown Web megalopolis. In retrospect, I'd have to say that all along I've been rooting for it. If Yahoo could make it, I figured, then there may well be a business model for the Web, and all this time I've spent online won't be wasted after all. I remember interviewing Jerry Yang, Yahoo's co-founder, in early 1995, just after Netscape had added Yahoo to its Net Directory button (and subsequently pumped Yahoo's "hits" up 40 percent, to the then-astounding total of 10 million a week). At the time, Yang was still a graduate student at Stanford, but his coyness about whether he would quit to take Yahoo commercial was transparent. Within a month of the interview, Yahoo had big money from the Sequoia venture capital fund and was off to the races. Frenetic hardly begins to describe the first six months of 1995. Every search engine company grabbed venture capital and prepared to go public. For a time it seemed that the essential democratic possibilities of the Net might be overwhelmed by the search engine gold rush. There's no question that the likes of Yahoo, Excite, Lycos and Infoseek were the leading culprits in fomenting the Internet stock madness that has besieged us ever since. But it hasn't all been bad. When Yahoo registered its first actual profit -- $92,000 in the fourth quarter of 1995 -- I was thrilled. Why, whaddaya know, there is money in them thar hills. Through it all, Yahoo found ways to remain connected to its roots in the primordial infrastructure of the Net. Yahoo, more than any other major Web site, is built on free (aka open-source) software -- the Apache Web server, FreeBSD operating system and the Perl scripting language. Yahoo proves that industrial-strength Web operations -- not to mention a market capitalization of $31 billion -- can be based on non-proprietary software. Yahoo's example has provided a compelling argument to corporations everywhere to take a closer look at free software. As any good Web site must, Yahoo has kept morphing into new incarnations over the years -- and grown more interesting. In years past I sometimes failed to stop by for months at a time; now, I'm personalized! I've got my favorite college basketball teams and mutual funds pegged on a My Yahoo page. My headlines, my weather -- I even have a Yahoo mail address for that occasional trip to South Africa. It is, of course, entirely unfair for me to have singled out Yahoo for my personalization desires. I've compared the various offerings. There's not much to pick between what Excite or Microsoft or Go offer and Yahoo provides. I can fully understand impassioned cases being made for the particular personalization page of one's choice. Go with Excite, or go with Go, or even go with Microsoft. But in this era when Web page "stickiness" has suddenly become an all-important attribute, I am now glued to Yahoo. Once you've picked your personalization point, why change? Inertia, or laziness, is a potent force -- powerful enough to build an empire on. Why did I choose Yahoo? Perhaps because it supports free software. Or maybe because it doesn't kowtow to a major conglomerate. Or maybe because the pages load fast. Or, in the last, and most trivial analysis, maybe it is just because the very name "Yahoo," with or without its silly (Yahoo!) exclamation point, captures the bubbly exuberance that I still feel about the Net. Whatever the reason, after five years of flitting about the Web, I've
finally been pinned to the cardboard and placed under glass. My.yahoo.com
isn't my default page, but it might as well be -- I've found my
personalization home and I'd rather fight than switch. No doubt there are
rough waters ahead, but the deed is done. I'm stuck on Yahoo -- for
now.
Boo for Yahoo
Yahoo -- love it or hate it? Confess in Table Talk's Digital
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