As Microsoft Powers Yahoo!'s Search, Whither Yahoo!'s Open Efforts?
by Sam Dean - Jul. 30, 2009Comments (2)- Related Blog Posts
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Back when Microsoft was actively pursuing an acquisition of Yahoo!, only to withdraw its bid, many observers felt that the withdrawal was good news for Yahoo!'s many open source and open initiatives. But we made the point back then that the game might just have begun. From Yahoo!'s open strategy for developers, to its Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI), to the company's reliance on Hadoop for advanced fast queries, Yahoo! has always been a strong supporter of open standards. Yahoo!'s entire site runs on FreeBSD--a free operating system descended from AT&T Unix.
Microsoft still isn't acquiring Yahoo!, but it has struck a far-reaching search deal with the company. What are the implications for Yahoo!'s many open source and open standards initiatives?
As InfoWorld notes, Yahoo!'s decision to allow Microsoft's Bing search engine to power its searches can be interpreted as "tossing in the search towel." Company officials have said that the deal will immediately save Yahoo! hundreds of millions of dollars in annual expenses. In other words, Yahoo! won't be investing much in search technology anymore, if any, while Microsoft will.
That fact immediately catapults Yahoo!'s search APIs (application programming interfaces), YUI, its long-standing support of and contributions to Hadoop clustered query technology, and more initiatives toward an uncertain future. InfoWorld also notes that the future is very uncertain for Yahoo!'s developer programs focused on projects such as Yahoo! BOSS and Search Monkey.
As part of its search deal with Microsoft, Microsoft's Bing will power Yahoo!'s searches, and there is one open source connection that won't be lost as that happens. As we've noted before, Bing leverages Powerset search technology, which is in turn powered by the open source Hadoop platform.
Still, though, search technology was a central focus for Yahoo! for many years, and its ties to open standards and open source efforts will undoubtedly be greatly reduced through the deal with Microsoft. ZDNet's Dana Blankenhorn writes that "Yahoo!’s open source projects are now held by a company that is cash poor." He also suggests that some of them might go up for sale, which I agree is a distinct possibility.
The Oracle acquistion of Sun Microsystems was the first example this year of a huge proprietary software company throwing a smaller company's open source efforts into question. The Microsoft/Yahoo! deal is another example.
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