Microsoft Yahoo Search Staff Shake Up
August 2, 2009
SFGate’s “Yahoo Searches for a New Start” contained an comment about the pending tie up of Microsoft and Yahoo in Web search. I found this comment insightful:
Many Yahoo employees will lose their jobs or have to move over to Microsoft. In a conference call this week, Bartz acknowledged the impact: “Yes, there are certainly many Yahoo search employees that will be asked to take jobs at Microsoft as they integrate the technology. … And then unfortunately there will be some redundancies in Yahoo. … There will be redundancies; it just is in the future.” She added that nothing will change until the two companies get regulatory approval for the partnership, which won’t happen until 2010 at the earliest. Then there’s a “transition” period, which will last for two years after that. But if we were Yahoo search employees, we’d start polishing those resumes now.
SFGate then added, without much factual underpinning in my opinion:
There should still be a place for them in Silicon Valley. Yahoo’s always had a fraught relationship with search – even in the early days, company founders Jerry Yang and David Filo never wanted to spend too much of Yahoo’s money building infrastructure – but it was healthy for Silicon Valley to have the two major search companies in competition right here. What would be healthiest would be for someone – perhaps one of those spurned Yahoo search employees – to launch a new company, perhaps to compete with Google. There should be room for all.
Search is on its way to becoming what the US government calls a donut hole. There is some action at both ends of the search spectrum, but in the middle you are without much coverage. On the consumer side, Google has sewed up search and is well on its way to make more headway in online advertising. The YouTube.com monetization is beginning to roll. DoubleClick holds promise. The Google is not sitting on its tail waiting to see what Microsoft and Yahoo will be doing if their deal is approved.
On the other end of the search spectrum are the specialized search vendors. You can say what you want about the 350 companies in this space. Right now, the giants are Autonomy, Coveo, Endeca, Exalead, Fast Search (installed base), and maybe a couple of others. Hugely influential are open source distributions and IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle who just bundle search in with other software to make big sales. Search is a commodity or give away. Google is a growing presence in this sector. If Google can gain share with some Fortune 50 companies, the enterprise search landscape will be realigned.
The Google has an on going need for wizards. Start ups need technical talent as well. But if Yahoo dumps lots of engineers in search and content processing, I am not so sure that these folks will find jobs right away. More likely is that the Google will snag the gems and the others will have to fight tooth and nail to find work in a Silicon Valley that is sitting in a physician’s waiting room. Just my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, August 2, 2009
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[…] this question in PLM Think Tank. On the one, very extreme side, I read Stephen Arnold is saying – search is a commodity or give away for free. On the other side of the street vendors like Autonomy is creating OEM alliances with Siemens, […]