O'Reilly's Right...

I caught this on Jeremy's blog earlier -- it's a reference to Tim O'Reilly's blog posting with advice for Yahoo!. So before I start let me give the standard disclamier:  I am writing as a normal person, not as a Yahoo! employee.  None of this reflects what my employer feels or thinks or is doing or is not doing. I don't think I need to add anything to O'Reilly's posting, so I will mass quote (emphasis added by me):

Yahoo! has let itself be defined by the same kind of penis envy. Here is a business that has beaten Google in area after area, that is unquestionably the #1 media company on the net, and yet has let itself be defined by the one area in which it is #2. Yahoo!: continue with your plan to outsource search to Google, just like you did before 2002, and plow those increased profits and reduced costs into your own innovation, strengthening the areas where you are #1, exploring new ideas that will make YOUR users insanely happy, and generally focusing on what makes Yahoo! great, rather than on what doesn't. That is, unless Microsoft makes you so good a deal for your search assets that you just can't say no. But either way, let yourself be quit of the destructive competition and focus on adding real value for your users.