Recently Yahoo announced that it has become a Platinum sponsor the the Apache Software Foundation. The announcement implies that Yahoo will be supporting funding and making available software and hardware resources for the initiatives at the Apache Foundation.
Yahoo is very often in the news as a far competitor to Google. Both Yahoo and Microsoft lag behind Google in the percentage of internet searches globally. And the gap keeps on widening.
It is ironic that Yahoo was the engine that popularized web search as well as one of the first to get into the online advertising model. It was Overture ( later acquired by Yahoo!) which pioneered the concept of online advertisements.
Yahoo’s branding as a media company has also been looked upon as one of the reasons why it lags behind its technology counterparts. While Google keeps itself clean from ownership of media (YouTube content is not exactly top quality media), Yahoo’s dabbling with content generation have not generated the expected returns.
It is in supporting the open source community that Yahoo is making big moves. The trend in the web development industry seems to be capitalizing on the collective skill and talent pool of all developers while tweaking and marketing the platform. Yahoo’s support for the Apache Foundation as with the dedicated resources for distributed computing projects such as Hadoop will pave the way for platforms to run the next generation internet applications. And Yahoo is making its investments so that it can capitalize on the proliferation of the development platforms.
The company has been on the recovery path ever since Jerry Yang took over the reins from Terry Semel. It will be interesting watching the resurgence of the firm as it takes upon its ever growing rival Google and the Goliath Microsoft.