That’s a quote in this rather bleak piece on Yahoo in today’s Times. The context? Google owns the table in the poker game that is online media. How about this excerpt from Saul’s piece:
“Yahoo has lost the favor it enjoyed a year or two ago,” said David Cohen, a senior vice president of Universal McCann, a media buying agency of the Interpublic Group. He said his clients were reducing the share of their budgets they allocate to Yahoo in favor of newer sites, like MySpace, and sites developed by big media companies like Viacom.
“There are more players in town, and the others are closing the gap relative to the things Yahoo is good at,” Mr. Cohen said.
But the problems at Yahoo go beyond advertising. From video programming to social networking — areas of interest to users and advertisers alike — the company is losing its initiative. And each time a product fails in the market or is late, Yahoo loses some ability to do more deals and hire more talented employees. The shares are down 38 percent this year, sending some employees out the door in search of better shots at stock market wealth.
Google, in the meantime, is taking advantage of Yahoo’s problems to cement crucial deals that could make its rival’s recovery even more difficult.
Ouch. More when I can say more. But I have to say this: Fortunes rise, and fortunes fall. Yahoo’s been here before. Google? Not so much. I’ve seen go go go – Apple in the mid 80s, Microsoft in the early 90s, Netscape in the mid 90s….and Google is on an extraordinary run – go go go for going on four years now. But that’s hardly a dynasty…yet.