Yahoo has really been impressing me in the last couple weeks. First the Open Search Platform and now this. I guess all it takes is the threat of a hostile takeover to get your productivity going.
I really hope they can stave off Microsoft, because I don't see the big M$ attempting to innovate like this if they took control.
Standardization and openness do not benefit the dominant player (or players, in close competition) in a market.
Standardization and openness tend to benefit all players that are not dominant in a market, by comoditizing the market and forcing value based competition.
If the majority of a market is locked up by the dominant player(s), standardization tends to not happen.
If the majority of the market is not locked up by the dominant player(s), things tends towards standardization.
As it pertains to Yahoo they're still an internet powerhouse, but their markets are eroding at a pace that they are probably falling out of the dominant category into the leader-of-the-non-dominant-pack category. Yahoo does some stuff very well, and I suspect commoditization of parts of web-space would be in their favor. The question is if they'll be able to push hard enough fast enough to make some of this stuff catch on while people still care.
Now, if the dominant player in a market was "foolish" enough to joyfully embrace standards even if their competitors weren't adopting standards very quickly, would they necessarily lose their "edge" over competitors, considerations of benefitting the market as a whole aside?
Well, one classic example: IBM and the PC market (where standardization helped) vs. Apple and the Mac clones (where standardization almost wiped Apple out).
Here's some more theorizing: I think it would depend on how saturated the market was. If standardization would cause the market to grow such that a smaller percentage of a bigger market was larger than a large percentage of a small market, the company could still benefit from standardization, but they'd also have to diversify in that time so that when saturation approached that they wouldn't get stuck in a commodity market while their competitors could catch up.
Nope, just being typically over-analytical. But I suspected that there are people that had written more well reasonsed versions of such. Noted for my list of people to look up. :-) I started reading my first business books since freshman accounting about a month ago.
I don't see the big M$ attempting to innovate like this
Yahoo's recent openness binge is so strategically opposite to Microsoft that I wonder if they aren't doing this in part to impede the takeover, or as a sort of post-takeover insurance.
You're anthropomorphizing. Giant corporations don't react at the human time scale. Anything you see coming out of the corp today has been under development for months, if not years.
A soon-to-be-ex-colleague wrote a good piece on this recently.
I really hope they can stave off Microsoft, because I don't see the big M$ attempting to innovate like this if they took control.