Yahoo!'s personality crisis

摘要

Students from Harvard Business School and MIT'S Sloan School of Management were recently invited to play a "war game" between the big four internet portals-Yahoo!, Google, Time Warner's AOL, and Microsoft's MSN. The organiser, Fuld & Company, a consultancy, split the students into teams, which began by delivering a brutally honest analysis of each firm's position and then did battle. Yahoo!, its team thought, is in essence a smorgasbord. "I don't have to be the best at everything; I just have to be good enough for you," said the team's presenter. Google's team, by contrast, was confident that it alone was the true technological innovator. The MSN team, predictably, talked mostly about "leveraging Windows", Microsoft's ubiquitous operating system, which excited nobody. And the AOL team began its presentation by saying that "we are fortunate just to be invited to the party." In the end, Google won and Yahoo! came last. The winning team got $5,000.