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When I got to Yahoo the only in-house "search engine" was a building full of Surfers. Yahoo was a directory, not a search engine. When you searched you got human-powered results and after that, algorithmic results supplied by someone else. So I can't agree that search, as we understand it today, is the core of Yahoo's brand. Never was. It's the core of Google's brand, and for too long Yahoo hasn't been able to sufficiently articulate why Yahoo isn't Google.

Yes, Yahoo eventually bought Inktomi and decided to compete in search engine technology. But it was an innovative, engineering-driven company before that, and there's no reason it can't be again. If it wants to be. If search is the most exciting space for Internet engineers 5 or 10 years from now, we're going to be very bored.

Somewhere in the early part of this decade Yahoo decided it was a media company, and a search company, and a bunch of other things it could buy or dip a toe into. So it is the interim Yahoo culture that maybe is dead, not the "old" Yahoo. The "old" Yahoo was creative, bold, swaggering, change-the-world, we're making this up as we go along, nothing that came before us matters anymore. It defined much of what we take for granted online today.

If Yahoo can recapture that--if it can go off and find fertile new ground for innovation while Microsoft and Google lumber around the search pasture butting heads, it will find its soul and lead the next wave of innovation. It will again define what it means to be "online" in a connected world.

This could be very good for Yahoo indeed. We'll see if they have what it takes to make the most of it.

Yes, Yahoo eventually bought Inktomi and decided to compete in search engine technology. But it was an innovative, engineering-driven company before that, and there's no reason it can't be again. If it wants to be. If search is the most exciting space for Internet engineers 5 or 10 years from now, we're going to be very bored.

Somewhere in the early part of this decade Yahoo decided it was a media company, and a search company, and a bunch of other things it could buy or dip a toe into. So it is the interim Yahoo culture that maybe is dead, not the "old" Yahoo. The "old" Yahoo was creative, bold, swaggering, change-the-world, we're making this up as we go along, nothing that came before us matters anymore. It defined much of what we take for granted online today.

If Yahoo can recapture that--if it can go off and find fertile new ground for innovation while Microsoft and Google lumber around the search pasture butting heads, it will find its soul and lead the next wave of innovation. It will again define what it means to be "online" in a connected world.

This could be very good for Yahoo indeed. We'll see if they have what it takes to make the most of it.