Maybe.
Today Yahoo released Yahoo Screens for iOS, a streaming video app that puts all Yahoo’s video in one place for easy access and playback through the phone. Right now it looks like mostly clips, but between SNL and Comedy Central, they have plenty of attractive stuff right off the jump. Which makes for a nice app on top of the completely-reengineered Flickr app, and the excellent rebranded Yahoo Sports app (formerly Sportacular), and a best-of-breed Fantasy Football app, and a Yahoo Weather app so good that Apple basically lifted 85% of its UI wholesale for iOS 7, and…
Hm…
Don’t look now, but Yahoo is quietly salting a mine over there in Sunnyvale. They’re turning out some very good mobile apps, they’ve apparently administered Tumblr with a light touch (and are dogfooding it for their own product blogs, apparently), and they just poached a deputy editor of the New York Times to run Yahoo News. And for all the hype and opprobrium about the new logo, people are talking about it – and the very clean modern white-and-purple suggests a grown-up company with serious ambitions.
See, Yahoo was Google before Google. Not just in terms of search, where Yahoo was the search engine from the days of being hosted at akebono.stanford.edu – Yahoo had a meaningful presence in chat, in portals, in all-in-one Internet content like scores and stock quotes and weather. And in mail, where they were an original part of the iPhone launch and the only provider of actual push-style email. There are plenty of people who are still using a Yahoo email address to this very day.
In short, Yahoo is ideally positioned to be an alternative to Google, because they already have millions of potential users who already have accounts, because they were Yahoo users ten years ago. All people need is a reason to take a second look, and a lot of people are finding one – whether over Google paranoia, or from intrigue over interesting new phone apps, or just because it looks new and fresh and still has everything you need for fantasy football except a way to keep Victor Cruz from only making catches in the end zone. They’re still a built-in option for mail and search on every iOS device, and unlike Microsoft or Google, they’ve never competed directly with Apple in anything Apple sells for money…which makes them an ideal partner going forward.
And let’s not forget who’s in charge at Yahoo – the former Google employee number 20, the one who probably wouldn’t mind laundering the title of Queen of Silicon Valley that Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman managed to drag through the mud and taking it for herself. On present form, you have to think that resurrecting one of the grand old names of the dot-com boom era would get that done – and it looks like she could very well pull that off. I’d love to see it happen. We need another superpower.