Wired on Friday: At dinner in London recently, I sat next to an ex-Yahoo employee. His loyalty to his old company was rather moving: he talked excitedly about the amount of research and development they conduct, and complained bitterly about how Google got all the publicity. "Google sneezes, and the world writes it up," he complained.
These days, the headlines are more likely to read "Has Ailing Google Caught Deathly Illness?". The freshly-IPOed search engine still commands much of the media coverage, but has recently suffered from a series of very public missteps. And, among the many waiting in the company's wings, Yahoo appears to be recommandeering much of the attention.
To pick a handful of Google's errors (just from the last month): in the first week, Google announced its "Web Accelerator", a service that, it claimed, would speed up many users' internet access. A few days later, the brakes were stomped upon, and the service was withdrawn: one of the side-effects of using the Accelerator, it turned out, was lost webmail and files.
Last week, Google updated its "Toolbar" (a mini-application that provides Google-friendly options at the top of your Internet Explorer window).
The old toolbar included a feature, AutoLink, that had inspired outrage in one group of web designers, and which many petitioned to have altered.
The new toolbar determinedly maintained the same feature: certainly within Google's rights, but a little daring for a company that insists it will never "be evil".
Finally, last week, Google announced that its users would be able to personalise the Google front page with their own content. For those who select it, the feature does away with the uncluttered look of Google. No real mistake here. But the capability seemed reminiscent, like a limited version of My Yahoo, Yahoo's personalised portal that it introduced over nine years ago.
Indeed, in many ways, Google 2005 is beginning to look like Yahoo 1996. A successful IPO has led to a temporary wobbliness in direction, as the company seeks to replicate its singular success in several directions at once.
Ageing underdog Yahoo, on the other hand, has recently hit a string of critically praised projects. Last week in the US, it launched Yahoo Music Unlimited, a $5 per month subscription music service which many critics feel is the first genuine competition iTunes has felt in the music download market. On the geekier front, in March it introduced Yahoo Search Web Services - a toolkit for developers wanting to write their own applications around the company's search engine.
The support was acclaimed as being a lot friendlier than Google's equivalent service: particularly galling, as Google was the pioneer in providing easy hooks for third-parties to connect to its databases.
So what is Yahoo doing right, and Google so wrong?
Although it might annoy my dining partner, much of Yahoo's success right now comes from that lack of publicity. Yahoo can research in quiet, learning from Google's trailblazing mistakes. While the market leader leads the technological advances, Yahoo can carefully pick and improve upon the winners. Yahoo's slow-moving nature means that it mulls longer than rivals, and with Google in the lead, it has the time.
The Yahoo Music Unlimited project is the result of both cherry-picking some of the best developers from previous experiments in music-sharing, and careful negotiation by Yahoo's Hollywood-friendly CEO, Terry Semel, ex-Warner Bros chairman. Subsidised by the stable profits of the rest of the Yahoo operation, it significantly undercut its rivals.
Two years in the making, Music Unlimited's launch came largely out of the blue, at least for consumers. The truth was, the existence of the product was fairly well-known within industry circles.
Which brings up another advantage: Google is notoriously secretive while Yahoo doesn't have to be. Its very size can hide vast internal projects.
The very impenetrability of Yahoo provides a market advantage. As the past month has shown, it's very hard to soft-launch a Google product. Despite the company's insistence that some products are "beta" and therefore not to be relied upon, many users trustingly throw themselves into novel Google releases, with nasty results.
And even though Yahoo doesn't pursue secrecy, it's hard to peer into the multinational. Compared to Google's simple business model, it's difficult to discern, as an outsider, which bits of Yahoo make the money. But make money it does - over $800 million (€637 million) in profits last year. (Although admittedly $300 million of those profits were gained by selling Google stock.)
Ultimately, Yahoo's advantage comes from at least five years of boring dependability. Investors, reporters, and occasionally the first-adoptor users that Google has courted for so long are all far more skittish - and they project that nervousness upon their favourite company. Google is a mini-boom all of its own, and everyone is now waiting for it to fail.
In many ways, this is all about publicity. Perhaps it is a shame that such fashions are as important to market success as they are. But Yahoo does well from its position in the shadows, and Google isn't doing too badly out of its limelight positioning either.
As Google struggles to look mature enough in front of so many eyes, the well-heeled newcomer will remain unsure of where to place its footing.
However, it will survive the attention: Yahoo did.
