Michael Arrington reports that Bear Stearns says Yahoo should get itself a social network because social networks are the next portal. Here is their entire PowerPoint.
It made me want to scream:
Portals are dead, damnit. They are the last vestige of old-media bigthink, of the misguided belief that media can corral us into masses and that we want to be treated like herds. The essential moral to the story of Yahoo’s decline is that it is a portal and portals don’t work. But here’s Bear Sterns looking for the next portal. Arrrggghhh.
You know what I’m going to say: The real question they should be asking is WWGD — what would Google do? I argued when Terry Semel was bounced that Yahoo should blow itself up and become the unportal, enabling anyone anywhere to take anything from Yahoo and put it on their own sites, feeding content — which Google doesn’t have — and advertising all around the web, becoming the great enabler of social interaction via content rather than buying Facebook. I hope Yahoo doesn’t buy Facebook — even though Bear Stearns now says the value is $5-6 billion (versus the $1 billion Mark Zuckerberg quite wisely turned down) — for I fear that like other things Yahoo buys, it would freezedry it in time, stifling innovation by bringing it into that corral.
The next portal? No, Yahoo is the last portal.
