Though Google has swept aside its competition and has been highly successful, it has not stopped Yahoo’s CEO Carol Bartz from pointing a flaw in Google’s strategy.
Bartz said “Google is going to have a problem because Google is only known for search. It is only half our business; it’s 99.9% of their business. They’ve got to find other things to do.”
Also, in terms of how Google will be judged as it attempts to find those other things, Bartz observed, “Google has to grow a company the size of Yahoo every year to be interesting.”
The 99.9 percent figure is obviously an exaggeration. Still, if you figure that Google has a market cap of around $169 billion and Yahoo’s market cap is closer to $24 billion, the second remark doesn’t seem too inaccurate.
So as Bartz indicated, that puts a lot of pressure on Google to succeed at something other than search. Whether that something’s Android, Google Apps, the TV Ads program, or a different product doesn’t matter, but in this light, Yahoo’s rather scattered network of properties starts to look a little more attractive.