Earlier, I ranted about the poor quality of answers on Yahoo Answers. In 2006, information on Yahoo Answers was of higher quality, and the site was hailed by TechCrunch as Yahoo’s long term strategy for overtaking Google:

Yahoo earlier this year oddly admitted that it’s not their goal to be No. 1 in Internet search. “We would be very happy to maintain our market share,” CFO Susan Decker told Bloomberg… I think that they decided to lose the algorithmic keyword search battle and focus their resources elsewhere in order to win the search “market share” war…

Yahoo! is sensibly looking change the battle ground by providing a different type of search, one not based on complex mathematical algorithms but one that could answer questions like “how will mankind save the planet?” Putting this question into Google resulted in no search results being returned and yet you could pose the very same question on Yahoo! Answers and would probably get a few hundred answers if you were not famous and several thousand if you were.

What went wrong?

If you read Forbes, you may remember a 2010 article, titled Stop Focusing on Your Core Business, which suggested that Yahoo had failed because they couldn’t move fast or enter new markets. I can’t understand how anyone can think that, considering that even this run-on sentence only covers 25% of the 72 businesses that Yahoo has ever been involved in. Rather, Yahoo’s mistake was utter incompetency and a chronic lack of focus. They focused on width over depth, and they lost everywhere as a result. (StackOverflow is the counter example: They focused on community and quality, and the resultant community is indisputably excellent.)

If you follow Hacker News, you surely know the most common advice given to startups: pivot. Pivoting is swell, but here is a more fundamental lemma that Yahoo would do well to study: Don’t make half-assed attempts.

A search for the word “pivot” on Hacker News returns 1,923 results, a search for “core business” only 594. That’s a shame. Google succeeded because they knew their core business was search, and they provided the best damn search results anywhere. If you’re creating a startup, or writing a piece of software, you should focus on competency in the narrow problem space you choose. There may eventually come a time to expand -  hell, if you’re there, you shouldn’t be reading this blog post – and note that most areas Google expanded to were related to selling ads (Gmail, Google Maps) or improving search results (Google Plus). They always focused on consumer problems and provided solutions that were better for consumers.

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