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I'm Chris Kalaboukis, a director in the Intellectual Property Innovation group here at Yahoo!. I run a number of internal innovation programs, one of which solicits, evaluates, and acts upon ideas from any and all Yahoo! employees; yet another asks Yahoos to look far into the future and envision products and services for that future. Often, I hear people complain about how Yahoo!, in comparison to our perceived competitors, is not doing so well.

People, both internally and externally, compare us to Google and other companies in that space, and complain that we can't compete and aren't innovative. That’s pure BS. The fact that we aren't doing as well as Google is based on false premises. Yahoo! isn't Google. We are much, much more than a search provider. If you look at all the areas we play in, and actually excel in, then we crush our competition. In News, Finance, Sports, Mail and other web offerings, we kick everyone’s butt on a regular basis. Despite that, we seem to be stuck in a funk because of our perceived follower status.

How do we combat this? I have a simple suggestion. Let's look at another industry that was once pronounced moribund. Consider gaming: the gaming industry was recently in such bad shape that the entire space was declared to be in decline, and one specific player was practically pronounced dead. Who am I talking about? Nintendo. Not much more than a year ago, prior to the announcement of the Wii, pundits were saying that gaming industry innovation was dead. Budgets for games were exploding; smaller developers were out of the running. Then innovation won. The Wii smashed all records. Any company in a similar position can closely observe what Nintendo did, and do something just as game-changing, but for the Web.

After hearing about the Wii I waited in line at 5a.m. a month prior to release to pre-order a console -- so that I could be assured of one for my kids. As one of the first owners of a Wii, I had no idea it would become a runaway smash hit. In fact, the Wii blew past Sony, re-established Nintendo as the leader in their space, and created a whole new market and playing field for games and gaming.

How did Nintendo do it? Simple – they stopped trying to beat the other guys at increased processing speed, better graphics etc., and looked at the core appeal of gaming. For most people, gaming is for FUN. Nintendo looked at the decline of the hardcore game market, looked around at people who weren't playing games, and asked – how do we get everyone else to pick up the controller and play?

We might ask a similar question and take a similar approach. Look at the core appeal of the Internet. There are still huge untapped markets out there. Yahoo! has more than 500 million users, but there are billions of people on the Internet. We already innovate. We are building and launching incredibly interesting new products. We should challenge our assumptions about the “search engine” field. We need to play in a new field, where WE are stronger. Let’s keep innovating, let people know about all the fantastic innovation that is going on within Yahoo!, and build our own field to play in. Like Nintendo and the Wii – we can and we will change the game.

wii-family photo by dcodez. Used with permission.

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