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Keith's Web Blog RSS Feed en-us http://www.keithwatanabe.net/index.php Keith Watanabe's Website Google and Yahoo in 2008 http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2008/1/2/2a85ded9a6471b256aef75886510d7f8.html You can't talk about Google without talking about Yahoo in some way. I think MSN should be made irrelevant as it is truly a 3rd rate copy of copies. But the big question should be how these two behemoths focus their energies for this year?

While Google looks mobile bound, Yahoo might be moving towards social. I really hate looking at these two companies in these terms because I think these terms are passe. I think there is another picture to look at, something bigger than just mobile and social (while these two are big, to me, it's just marketing's current buzz).

I think Google needs to become something like the engine of the internet. I guess you could call it the Web OS. It will form the basis of all internet related aspects. APIs, links to websites, data relation, etc. In other words, Google will become more of the foundation for how the internet runs. You have all of their open APIs like Base, Maps, Ads, Android, even OpenSocial to a degree.

Yahoo should focus on becoming The content provider/creator. If I were to refocus Yahoo, it would be to first get rid of all the useless things that it bought or things that doesn't do it any real good. For instance, I'd kill Yahoo's search. Just let Google power it. I don't see any difference anyway (which is a huge problem in my book).

Next I'd kill Yahoo's notion of it being a portal. A portal for what? What a stupid term that got a lot of companies in trouble for forcing people to try to do everything, but doing everything in a sloppy, disorganized, unfocused, and low quality manner. Yahoo shouldn't even have a "front" page anymore. They should get people to move towards "My Yahoo" or something more useful. Help people build their own page. I'm not talking about another shitty "let's share my stupid page with my friends" type of deal. I'm talking about going through their troves of content and letting users filter out all of their crap which makes their front page so confusing.

Yahoo should then focus on purely content APIs. News, weather, movies, music, TV, etc. Content, content, content, content. Let Yahoo be this middle man of content, a content distributor and even creator. Google will then find ways of mining it. It's a nice symbiotic relationship that they could build.

Also, Yahoo should be a front end service. If Yahoo is to be a content provider/creator, it must also figure out how to make such services presentable. In other words, make them look nice, make it easy for people to create more services, make it easy to access and figure out what's available for them. If you go to Yahoo's homepage, you'll see a bunch of junk floating around. You got some news items, a ton of confusing ads, this horrible sidebar in which my eye hardly glances, and a TINY search bar. Oh not to mention that stupid appearing menu for my email that enlarges and shrinks the page in annoying ways. What the hell is this? Yahoo is trying to push a ton of garbage onto me without figuring out what I want at first. It's almost like going to a generic buffet in Vegas. Going along the analogy of buffets, Google is more like the Wynn buffet, where you have smaller quantities of food, but the stuff is done well. On the other hand, Yahoo would be the Main Street of buffets, where you get tons of choices, but the preparation is done in a mediocre manner.

If I were re-designing Yahoo's pages, I would start with a blank page and just ask questions about what a user wants and slowly build up a page with all the content available for them. I suggest anyone with some authority at Yahoo to read my rant about Linux on the desktop. Yahoo needs a similar strategy. While Yahoo has the marketshare due to their long reign, I can easily imagine them losing it or at least pieces of it slowly to competitors who simply have more focused capabilities and better marketing.

Along those lines I'd also make Yahoo a single point of sign on for the internet. There should be some trusted crossover between Google and Yahoo to allow people to reutilize their email addresses as the same login between platforms. If that happens, then they should also get rid of the stupid page that forces people to re-login everytime and put everything into some framed version so that people don't have to go between various pages and have all their main applications and links centralized from a logical point.

Finally, Yahoo needs to return partly to their roots on what made them successful: a directory. While Yahoo as a pure directory is impossible because of the sheer number of services out there, Yahoo needs to re-invent itself in terms of marketing its applications in the form of a directory structure. Or something that bears resemblance to a directory to make sense of the hundreds of things within Yahoo. Having that sad little strip on the left side just doesn't cut it and I'm certain more services could potentially see the light of day if people weren't obstinate and realized how horrible of a front page that they have.

Google and mobile/wireless are combos people are going to start murmuring about since, well, it's Google trying to get in. While it'll be interesting to see their plans if they can get the bid, I'm more afraid of them failing in getting it. Probably if they make the bid, they'll open it up for everyone. I don't think that would be a great business decision. The infrastructure cost in that would be insane. But let's say that they don't get the duke. My alternative plan is for them to buyout AOL, kill dialup, improve LAN connectivity through installing fiber in major cities and lowering rates and selling that. Personally, I'd love to see that happen more than Google getting the wireless bid. I mean, it just makes more sense from a business perspective. The customers are already known, all you're doing is just upgrading lines, you destroy that evil faction of sales that AOL has, you get rid of the old dialups, move everyone to IPv6 so everyone will have a static IP and you can give the cable monopoly a real run for their money (i'm not sure if Time Warner still has a part in AOL, probably do so that'll make this deal even sweeter). Not to mention you'll make M$ shit in their pants because you end up controlling the other side of infrastructure.n The other major thing is that Google will finally have a new form of business to earn continuous revenue from. It will be a natural fit and a good way for the internet to finally evolve.

Yahoo should NOT make a purchase or investment in Facebook. I just think the whole SNS is passe. Yahoo should focus on improving what they have rather than continuously broaden themselves out. Let some other company like M$ make the mistake of investing in a piece of junk like Facebook. Have you seen Myspace recently? It still sucks even with the interface change! People just migrated over to Facebook! So is Murdoch's $650 million still worth it?

Both of these companies need to realize what they have and make better utilization of their resources. I think Google has a lot of momentum and brilliance while Yahoo has the legacy. But both simply lack focus to improve on what they have.

Anyway, if anyone wants to hire me as a strategist for either company, go to my profile page here and contact me through my linkedin account or facebook account.]]> Wed, 02 Jan 2008 02:22:15 -0700 http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2008/1/2/2a85ded9a6471b256aef75886510d7f8.html Microsoft's Strategy for 2008 (And Beyond!) http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2008/1/2/66ca7b3e12a9d6378fae1170483e1e6d.html Since I'm working on these 2008 strategies, I decided to give some advice to Microsoft: kill MSN. Or rather stop putting anymore money into it. Stop trying to compete against Yahoo and Google. Vista was a huge flop and everyone knew it. DRM, locked down devices, closed, proprietary systems are just so 1980's-2000. You had your 20 year run, it was great, we had fun, people made money, now it's time to move on.

First Microsoft needs to get rid of Ballmer. There I said it. He's not a geek, never will be, and I don't think anyone in the industry really respects him (much less likes him).

Microsoft should not put more money into Facebook. It's just a bad buy. Yeah, there's some nice things in there like games, but it's just integration. You just can do a little bit more than say Myspace. Sure, they have open APIs, but I just don't see a point still. I think SNS are great but I don't think anyone will be the be-all-end-all solution that these major companies are looking for. They're limited in what they can do and the only thing that they have is the occasional returning user. Great. Move on. For that matter, Microsoft should not get into the SNS space. It just doesn't fit who they are.

I mentioned this before, but I'll mention it again for their sake: Microsoft needs to go more into scientific computing. It blends with Bill Gates' philanthropic beliefs/causes. Google has moved into Green technologies, but Microsoft doesn't need to. Instead, I think a better area would be to focus on areas like medicine, genetics, nanotechnology, space exploration and robotics. Probably robotics is Microsoft's best bet and I would start shifting more budget into areas like automation. Think about things like centralized control of home appliances through one's computer. We have notions of services like networks, telnet, ftp, who, etc. but these are primitive compared to the potential number of services out there. Why build something 5th rate like Zune when there's probably a lot more practicality in things like timed heating, programmable meals, house cleaning, taking out one's garbage, cleaning the dishes, etc.? My stupid microwave is in Japanese, but the functions are identical to one sold in the US. Why should I be put into a situation where my limitation is the localized language? Imagine if it were controlled through my computer! You pick up your microwave dinner at the store, the microwave reads the barcode which translates into instructions on your computer. All you have to do is tell the computer when you want to eat.

Or how about a better vacuum? Have you ever seen those crappy ones with wheels? They're small and supposedly can go under your sofa. But what abouts the corners or ceiling where tons of mold can grow? I don't need another mp3 player, I need a better friggin' vacuum! And of course, this is simply AI and robotics. The funniest part is that this thing is such a common problem why hasn't someone tried to tackle it in an elegant way? The stuff I see is novel. I don't want novel, I want elegant and efficient. I see this situation as being more useful than a stupid XBox. If my clothes were cleaned, my bed made, my garbage taken out, my food made, my floors cleaned, my walls washed, my toilet scrubbed, then I could focus on more important things in my life (or rather that my place would be more hospital and I'd have more friends come over). I honestly don't care who solves this problem, but I think Microsoft has certainly the funds and people to make this thing work.

]]> Wed, 02 Jan 2008 02:47:09 -0700 http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2008/1/2/66ca7b3e12a9d6378fae1170483e1e6d.html StarCraft II http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2008/1/13/59b25aa3fa32c308ec5ce743f68e5d37.html right way. StarCraft II looks like it's shaping up to be a massive hit. The graphics are cutting edge as usual. But I'm heavily intrigued by the new units. One in particular looked just insanely awesome. It seems that the Blizzard team, in their constant attempts to appease us otaku fanboys, now are trying to put some of the Transformers/Macross Plus into their games!

What I really like is how Blizzard is able to incorporate more conceptual gameplay that goes beyond simple balanced statistics. For instance, check out this new Protoss unit called the Collosus. It isn't the prettiest thing to look at, but watch how it scales a wall, allowing you to strategically traverse difficult terrain. That idea incorporates the concepts of terrain, physics, graphics and gameplay without really just looking at boring game statistics.

Another element that's great about Blizzard games is that they incorporate a lot of social satire into their games. For instance, for the new Reaper units, there's a few funny lines:

"Reaper troopers are chemically altered to make them even more aggressive.."

"Perhaps unsurprisingly reapers are also enthusiastic users of stimpacks."

The first line is simply the whole notion of the biological experiments that occurred for soldiers in Vietnam with heroine, while there seems to be some unsaid sarcasm directed towards the whole drug use thing.

Either way, I'm looking forward to this game just on the basis of game play.]]> Sun, 13 Jan 2008 02:34:24 -0700 http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2008/1/13/59b25aa3fa32c308ec5ce743f68e5d37.html Recent Games http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2008/1/13/e3ec4121e189b278cc24f6adc7d775a6.html

Command and Conquer 3

This game could potentially get pretty addicting and frustrating simultaneously. The so-called "easy" level felt more like a difficult level. There was some interesting aspects to the game like the Nod Avatar vehicle being able to "upgrade" via crushing four different types of vehicles and then assimilating them. Also, giving the engineers (and engineer types) the ability to capture and restore Avatars, Juggernauts, etc.

However, I thought some of the game made it slightly harder to create and structure your base. The 3D tiling makes it really hard to place objects and gets confusing. I couldn't really deploy any sensible strategy based on distance because the terrain made judging distance quite tough. Also, what happened to some of the previous units from C&C2? For instance, the other Mammoth Tank Mk 2 was cool.

I still enjoy playing this series but the UI with the emphasis on 3D is making the game nearly unplayable or unmanageable. It's just far too complicated to manage so many units and deal with all the different elements interacting with each other on screen. It's definitely a lot different than the old Dune days.

Heroes of Might and Magic 5

To show you how long I've been playing these games, I started out on Might and Magic I and practically played most of the series. I missed out on 4 & 5 as well as King's Quest (because I heard that it was impossible to run on a Commodore 64). Ever since M&M1, I've been trying to get every game that's come out per year. When 3DO when out of business, I got depressed since two of the best series were dead in the water.

Fortunately, Ubisoft bought the rights to the game and resurrected it. What they produced in HOMM5 was a graphically updated version of HOMM3. I found the game to be far too well balanced as if the creators decided to take a safe route and appease hardcore old school fans. From what I've read, HOMM5 employs the World of Warcraft graphics engine, which isn't bad, but I think there was some problems that I need to point out.

The game is quite heavy and prone to crashing. Sometimes you can't even load the game. I got the extension Hammer of Fate and it had some audio problems just after the initial load. Apparently, the game designers decided to hold off on any further updates and recently had released a new extension Tribes of the East with the latest patches. I'm actually pretty disappointed that more maintenance on the game hasn't been done because this game is VERY buggy.

My biggest gripe about the game is that the AI takes far too long to go through a single turn. At one point, I would wait at least 10 minutes for the AI to complete a turn! This is absolutely ridiculous! During my little Christmas break, I would go between cleaning up my apartment and playing the game because each turn was taking too long.

Another huge disappointment with the game is the unwieldy game editor. I loved the previous games because they provided a cool editor for building your own scenarios. However, with more 3D effects becoming prominent, it's obvious that HOMM5 too has fallen by the wayside and emphasized form over story and gameplay. The editor just is too frustrating to work with. For example, the dizzying zoom in and out effects when trying to place an item becomes nerve wracking that I just end up giving up.

From that one thing I have to say is that the world isn't really that much bigger. In fact, it feels like it shrank despite having the ability to visually zoom into more details. Some of the gameplay was lost between 4 and 5 as well. For instance, you can't move use individual creatures as units without the hero. That was one cool feature with HOMM4.

Hopefully, Ubisoft does not stop producing the HOMM and M&M series and that they utilize these two releases as learning experiences in expanding the HOMM/M&M universe.

Elder Scrolls 4

I had picked up Morrowind (Elder Scrolls 3) a few years ago and discovered what a gorgeous environment that was created. My coworker at Ticketmaster later showed me a screenshot of the newest version and I was baffled. So I couldn't wait a few years back to pick up what looked like a highly immerse, incredibly detailed world.

To say the least, Elder Scrolls 4 probably was too immersive. Meaning that there's so much detail, you feel lost. I enjoy games with detail but I don't like the fact that the detail forces you to waste a lot of time. For example, in both games, if you want to travel around, there's no easy short cuts outside of just walking from point A to point B. I mean, they did have some town teleportation type of tricks, but in general, if you're looking for a cave, you really have to delve into the game and find it. I got frustrated on more than one occasion because I'd end up losing confidence in determining whether or not a particular place was the real spot.

The other thing that I don't particularly enjoy about such a game is that you feel like you're wasting time with meaningless travel. In the whole going from point A to point B, you might not doing anything outside of just walking for long periods. No fights, no items to pick up, no meaningful quests to solve. Just walking. If you ever saw the movie Manos: the Hands of Fate, then you'd know the pain I feel.

I think gameplay just look a good movie, a good book, and a good song should be meaningfully filled. You don't want to waste the user's time on gratuitous graphics just for bragging rights. And you definitely don't want to increase the user's frustration level too much either. Take Ultima 5 for instance. In Ultima 5, the world is QUITE large for an RPG, even now. Lots of towns to explore and many options to do. But the gameplay is never boring, imo. Even as you're wandering, you might encounter a group of trolls or orcs to get a little bit of experience. Sure, Elder Scrolls does something similar, but I think the presentation make each games different in terms of something that feels rewarding.

I've yet to complete this game, so maybe I might try taking it up again sometime in the near future.

Neverwinter Nights 2

I got a few of my friends somewhat addicted to this game. This type of game really replaces the whole Friday/Saturday night D&D game + pizza concept. But I really like the way you can build up different types of characters and experiment.

The latest installment wasn't as big of a hit as the first one. Perhaps, the biggest problem from what I've read was that the game was too loose and didn't have the same level of story telling as the first game. Also, the ending supposedly was anti-climatical. However, I've yet to finish this one either so I'll judge for myself.

I think the interface wasn't as fluid at times as the original. I had to re-map the keys to make the game play smooth. I enjoy the moving camera concept to some degree. It reminds me of some of these contemporary Matrix-like movies with the floating camera perspective. It doesn't seem to take away too much from the game play and you can do some cool stuff like zoom up on a treasure item or monster.

I don't like the fact though that like many AD&D games, they limit your level. Level limits just don't make too much sense for me as it seems that putting a cap on a character's growth just makes the game boring and forces you to find something less limiting after a while. Also, I hope that they publish many extensions that provide newer items and upgrades.

Also, I really hope that this game expands on the notion of interacting with the world. One thing that I've always loved about the Ultima series has been that the world increasingly becomes more interactive. I like the idea of being able to make bread, push a chair or break a glass item. Visual appeal is only one aspect of making a world immersive. You have to provide the elements of workability to compliment the look of a game. Otherwise, everything is simply gratuitous CG.

Anyway, these are my thoughts for now. I think there was one other game but I'll have to check before bitching about it again :)]]> Sun, 13 Jan 2008 03:32:22 -0700 http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2008/1/13/e3ec4121e189b278cc24f6adc7d775a6.html Yahoo's Open Strategy, Not Bad, Not Great Either http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2008/4/30/24dcb135b13a6aee7663adcf3d1a455c.html Yahoo with regards to their strategy of openness. I like basic concept because it's what I've been saying for years that Yahoo needs (needed) to do. Of course with the pending Microsoft deal, it's hard to say whether or not this strategy will have legs, but let's ignore that possibility for now and focus on this current core strategy.

In Techcrunch's article, it's mentioned that:

Yahoo wants to turn itself into one big social network-driven site, and simultaneously open many of its core services to get users and developers thinking of Yahoo as their Internet hub.

I think Yahoo should avoid utilizing the buzzword "social network" at all cost. It's passe and screams to me of lost revenue. They had long lost the grounds on this to other competitors, most notably Facebook and Myspace. The whole "let's share" and "add as friend" thing are just fancy groupware motifs re-packaged for investors. And Yahoo doesn't need investors at this point (well, they need a missile to hit Seattle for their sake, but that's a different story). However, opening their core services is the start of where they should be going (and probably if they pushed it about 4-5 years ago, they could've had a huge leg up Facebook and Google).

The other part in the Techcrunch article that's good to point out is this quote:

There are three components to the additional news announced today - platformization, opening services, and portability.

These ares are definitely the direction they want to move in. Unfortunately, Google has already done these things whereas Yahoo is in the proposal stage and this screams of "they just copied Google!" I do like the fact that Yahoo is focusing on PHP (actually SecurePHP) as it will help a PHP guru like myself actually be able to get started quicker than say with Google (and again make someone like me more apt to use Yahoo than Google). They call their engine YAP (Yahoo Application Platform).

It seems the chief purpose in this is primarily for user retainership. Not sure if that should be the chief purpose, but it's what they want.

Now, let me show you a counter strategy to Google's based on my limited view of what Google is doing with things like Google Apps Engine, etc.

Originally, I was saying that Yahoo needed to become an infrastructure platform for businesses, kinda like what you're seeing Amazon's EC2, Google Apps Engine, Sun's N2, etc. The problem is that the majority of businesses trying to use the internet as a platform just have bad practices. Too many outages, the high cost of setting, maintaining and improving that infrastructure to scale and (here's the key point for myself) simply re-inventing the wheel each time. Companies that do provide this level of scale can eventually monetize that knowledge through re-selling their platforms. As a side effect, you get to reduce your IT department size, since you no longer have to worry about dealing with a data center and can hopefully focus on business development by outsourcing the infrastructure component to a competent entity that utilizes best practices.

That's the start of the future for Yahoo. But there's more....

I view Yahoo's future strategy as inverting their existing system.

Right now, as users, we land on their homepage and utilize only certain aspects. A lot of the crud that goes on their homepage is unnecessary cruft whose value and mileage varies on a per-user basis. And a lot of the current stuff seems like legacy portal content. In opening up Yahoo, they need to reverse that aspect and expose all that content for developers like myself.

They've partly accomplished this through some feeds. But we need more as I have been saying. I think Yahoo needs to leverage the numerous partnerships with whomever they're getting their content from and allowing people to access that content without fear of repercussion from a lawsuit. Imagine if someone wants to develop a music application. That person could utilize Yahoo's service and create something without getting sued by the RIAA. That's a move that Google clearly has not implemented (yet). We need to be able to access deep, specialized levels of information and reutilize existing things on Yahoo. Imagine for instance, a developer/homepage creator being able to take images, audio and video from Yahoo to create a fanpage for their favorite artist. If a developer can host such an application on Yahoo but legally be able to utilize such resources without fear of a lawsuit because of some legal clause Yahoo can provide as part of their service offering, that means Yahoo services can potentially be revenue, socially and technologically driving. I see this as a positive pro-active stance on what so many companies shy away from.

I mean people talk about Mashups all the time, which to me are nothing more than something like a DJ splicing together bits and pieces to create a mix. But for this to work there needs to be something protecting people so that these services can truly flourish. Can Yahoo be the key to provide this type of service for developers? Perhaps cut a revenue sharing deal with those artists, studios, producers, and content producers to allow developers to do such things.

Another part, and I think this is a key piece to Yahoo's long term survival (without Microsoft) is empowering the users on the ad front. The big problem I have with ads is that people who want to use them are powerless to the randomness of context based algorithms. Certainly what Overture/GoTo.com originally did was innovating and helped create an industry of its own. But the fuel for those days is depleted and they must find a new source. My major complaint about context ads simply is this: they suck. I never feel like there's enough control and that web programmers are forced into some stupid SEO madness that really has no ROI, except for those who have high traffic. It's always just been up to the webmasters to manage this. Of course, the argument for this area is that people simply don't have time to manage these things (it's almost like managing being a day trader). But at the same time the automation algorithms used to analyze one's site sucks and it's mostly what seems to be pure chance and high traffic where one can earn money for this.

But in the end, people just aren't clicking on ads and people instead are turning to other solutions (some which are nefarious) to handle this aspect. Which in the end implies that the solutions provided by Yahoo Search Marketing, Google AdWords, Microsoft AdCenter only can survive because of the size of these companies, not by the quality of the ad service provided. Thus for me at least, control and the ad quality are what Yahoo need to improve upon. If they can open up these services and allow developers to better tune ads to their advantage rather than relying on Yahoo's algorithms, there's a better chance for Yahoo to excel in this aspect.

Opening search is a must. Google shot themselves in the foot by killing their old web service and forcing everyone to move towards their branded AJAX search. I know what Google was thinking, but it was a bad long term move. It is true that I use Google as my primary search engine, which naturally makes me inclined to prefer Google as the number one candidate if I would want to write some search function. However, closing search and limiting it to a branded AJAX search just sucks. Yahoo easily can compete here by providing unlimited queries with an XML response. I don't think the results returned are going to be that much different in quality either these days.

And here's some radical but (Google) killer ideas for Yahoo in terms of being innovative:

They need to not impose any limits on queries returned from their results. I think Google's use as an Apps Engine is limited simply because they impose limits. Some of Yahoo's services, like search, already does this. Amazon has limits too but they're smart enough to understand how to monetize their services for the enterprise (which to me means of the three, they'll survive in the long term). Still some of their services are limited like Amazon's Web Service function has a limit of 1 second per query per IP address. For a site that intends to be high volume one day, this imposes a huge restriction on being able to do things like threading queries, this is an impractical limit. It's like what I said about Google's DB only being able to return 1000 results at a time: the most serious application you can write in truth is a local pizza ecommerce site.

Here's where Yahoo can easily differentiate themselves again from the competition by removing such limitations on their services. If Yahoo could provide the equivalent of Amazon's Web Service search for their content without the limited query response, I'd switch in a second. The natural goal for any website is to scale up; so if the bottleneck becomes these services' limitations, then developers will end up being forced to shop around for someone who offers a better version. And that's a great place where Yahoo or some major content providing company can enter.

Finally, and here's the most radical idea that I think companies like Yahoo, Google and Microsoft need to move towards in attracting us developers is that they need to become something like VC funds. I'm certain that many developers like myself dream of the day that our little service will one day get bought out by Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, AOL, etc.. I've known people personally who had this happen.

What has been killing someone like myself is simply that I can't focused all my energy on my own stuff. I've got to take a day job and can only put in 4-10 hours maximum a week on my own projects. And even those hours are not guaranteed.

I'd love to see someone like Yahoo or Google just toss money at me to develop the next killer application. And there's no doubt in my mind that others feel the same way. This would be crazy as the flood of applications would be unlimited and you'd be creating a huge hot zone for an even faster push on the technology side. This would be like a renaissance of computing (things are already happening like this but a lot of what we get is crap). But given the potential of services provided by Yahoo, the openness of their feeds and usage of infrastructure, etc. the quality level might be a lot higher.

There are some catches to my idea, but as with everything, there's a method to my madness. And there's a nice way for Yahoo to monetize this nutiness:

The venture money would come in tiers. So it all depends on the ambitiousness of the project. It might range from $50 for a silly localized pizza site, to $1500 seed money per week/month all the way up to $60,000 for a one year contract on a project. I'm certain Yahoo already does something like this internally where budgeting for projects get proposed and then later killed. This probably is a far cheaper solution.
There would be a review process on applications based on the scale of the project. People who want the highest ($60k) tiered project must receive a review of their site/business plan with their business development groups. This helps potential businesses work with people who specialize in growing businesses.
Periodic code reviews with internal Yahoo developers will go on consistently.
Now, here's where Yahoo gets the money back: depending on the success of the site, Yahoo would get an automatic level of ownership of the business/application, revenue sharing, etc. guaranteeing that they would get a return on their investment. Again, it's a VC fund so Yahoo essentially gets first dibs.

The thing is that this is a new form of ecommerce, risk taken to the extreme. There's too many punk kids like myself who just don't want to deal with the ego slamming of venture capitalists (in my case because we've seen how typical VCs operate and simply because most of us don't have an MBA). But you gotta ask yourself (that is YOU Yahoo!) did Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Larry Ellison, Steve Wosniack, Sergie Brin, Larry Page, and even your own David Filo and Jerry Yang have MBAs when they formed some of the most powerful companies around? No, they just had dreams like myself. A lot of it was talent and there certainly was tons of luck involved in all of that. Now, as a fellow tech dreamer, I want the same and many of my friends do too. But we're all scared of leaving our day jobs in doing something crazy. Still we want it. And we need guarantees.
The thing is that this type of thinking is socially changing. It's social engineering at its best. It's the thing that's needed by Yahoo to inject into it's public image as being friendly and appealing to the common man. Think of the benefits:

A monstrous new playing field of applications and technology that will driven by the sheer competition.
Switching the landscape of venture capital.
Practically guaranteeing the success and expedient adaptation of Yahoo's services.
A definite win on both sides in terms of ROI; Yahoo gets money and control back for their services; punk kids like myself don't have to go to an office every day and might make it big.
The creation of new industries as a result.
The continual elevation of importance of developers within Yahoo.
Providing best practices to the industry at large.

This is real innovation at its best. I mean, why should Yahoo spend several hundred millions of dollars in acquisitions when they can pay independent developers a few thousand a month to do this? The money translates to the same thing so rather than on focusing on an existing acquisition strategy with and unforeseen return on investment, you're getting immediate control for what people want and helping to mold it.

I see this strategy as being a monstrous success for the sustainable growth of Yahoo. It's my analogy of selling cigarettes/marajuana to minors; gradually, you upgrade them to crack and heroin. But the difference is that the heroin is socially beneficial.

So Yahoo, make THIS happen. This is the real vision for what you want. This is partly what you're doing through your overpriced acquisitions. This is what poor starving developers (rather than poets as the proverb goes) like myself want. This is what the industry needs. And most importantly, this is SOCIAL.....SOCIALLY CHANGING.]]> Wed, 30 Apr 2008 13:08:28 -0600 http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2008/4/30/24dcb135b13a6aee7663adcf3d1a455c.html