Former Yahoo wizard Jeremy Zawodny offered his congratulations today to Yahoo for launching BOSS (aka Built your Own Search Service).
This is very exciting news. Obviously this is a very tenuous analogy, but I’m sort of reminded of MSFT/Apple strategy lines by this move.
Google (a la Apple) has a better product but (as far as tinkering with search by outsiders goes) it is hermetically sealed. Yahoo (a la MSFT) is going to try to leverage the rest of the world’s developers to expand its reach, potentially building their own set of “productivity search engines” that are the best examples of this (a la MS Office).
I look forward to people destroying this analogy.
Other coverage at ReadWriteWeb by Marshall Kirkpatrick explores this (BOSS, not the MSFT/Apple analogy) further.
Why is this on the ElephantDrive blog? We always thought that BOSS would be a good acronym for “best online storage service” so we noticed but we were sort of sad to see it co-opted for this…
