The Current Battle Front

When it comes to the internet experience there are two enormous giants standing face to face in Silicon Valley which are Google and Yahoo. Running frantically around them are many much smaller villagers who are gnawing at their ankles in an attempt to somehow hurt them and bring them down to their knees.As both of these giants have learn though in the recent years sometimes these smaller villagers can inflict enough damage to where you have to acquire them and use them as your weapons to reclaim lost ground. Two prime examples would be Yahoo’s acquisition of the photo sharing site Flickr (~$40 million) in 2005 and Google’s acquisition of the video sharing site YouTube ($1.65 billion) in 2006. Both of these acquisitions were key and sure stirred up a lot of dust and dirt in the sunny California valley.

So What's Next?

• Google needs to continue to focus on the further advancement and development of its video sharing monster YouTube. With Hulu.com, a video-on-demand joint venture of NBC Universal and News Corp, set to go into private beta in less than one month this may prove to be YouTube's toughest rival yet since its expected that Hulu will also offer video sharing like YouTube.
• Yahoo as a partner of Hulu needs to be ready to implement Hulu's video content as soon as its out of beta.
• Yahoo needs to forget about social networking for now. With their past bids for Facebook being rejected they are just too far out of the race in my opinion to start something new that could even come close to competing with Facebook, MySpace, or even Orkut for that matter.
• Google by the way what exactly is Orkut? The only reason I know its there is because I saw it on the menu.