It has been noted by many current and (alas) former employees that one of the main stumbling blocks of the Yahoo! ethos was/is fear. Fear coupled with a debilitating crisis of identity. Yahoo! had the good fortune in its early years to rake in the dough with very little in the way of competition. As far as advertising sales were concerned their only real competition in terms of regular eyeballs came from AOL. It was all low hanging fruit. Yahoo! didn't need to innovate it just needed to collect.

Of course this arrogant order taking would later come to haunt Yahoo! when advertisers grew resentful of the my way or the highway mentality and Yahoo! had to spend many years courting Madison Avenue again with it's Y! between its legs.

Yahoo! divided up its many and eclectic properties into fiefdoms - each competing against the other for advertising dollars. This, of course caused resentments, as some properties were always going to be more profitable than others (Finance versus Astrology for example). So when Broadcast.com was purchased for the baffling amount of 5.7 billion (surely the most ever paid for a bundle of Radio Shack gizmos, dishes all bundled to ageing VHS decks worshiping at the altar of the freely downloaded Windows Media Encoder) it was seen by the existing Yahoo properties as yet another threat to their revenue.

There was nothing subtle about the hostility between the Yahoo! HQ in Silicon Valley and the Broadcast.com facilities in Dallas. Dallas employees complained that they were considered the proverbial red-headed stepchild and Santa Clara employees complained that Broadcast.com employees were unhelpful and obstructive. It is true that anyone wishing to avail themselves of video streaming services had to deal with multiple and baffling levels of bureaucracy to do the most simple of things - stream a video (hopefully without the picture splitting in two). When my group in New York began to offer video production and streaming capabilities this further confused site integration issues when working for various verticals withing the company. I'd be on a call with Dallas and got the impression they were wondering who we were and why we were wasting their time.

So video at Yahoo! was neglected at the very time it should have been innovating. As a video producer creating content for both internal training and marketing purposes I was constantly being advised that my outrageous requests for QuickTime, Flash and Macintosh compatibility were just "un-Yahoo!" and not the direction the company wished to pursue.

There were valiant attempts made, however. Finance Vision as an early example of webcasting, looked great and provided a unique service: real-time financial news utilizing the best of traditional broadcast and online technologies and creating an effective hybrid. It should have served as a model for future program development and been nurtured and used as a media laboratory. Instead somebody, somewhere panicked, looked at a balance sheet and pointed to the nearest property that wasn't making the required amount of dollars right now, right this second - and gave it the axe, (and to heck with having an eye on the future). That this property should have been Finance Vision after millions had been spent on building a state-of-the art suite of studios at the then new Sunnyvale complex is equally puzzling. On the New York side, Finance Vision was thrilled we offered free production and editing when our schedule permitted. Why the folks in Sunnyvale driving this 30-person group tried to boil the ocean as opposed to partnering with MSNBC or CNBC is still a mystery. Also, the odds you ever hear of Finance Vision were slim as they never advertised its existance, it was call an experiment.

The feeling then was that Yahoo! just seemed to wish that video would just go away, this in spite of the fact that it had hired an ex movie mogul as its new CEO. There was a policy of the left hand giving and the right hand taking away. Hollywood TV execs would be hired, championed and then stymied at every turn. Such video programming that did make it through such as "The Nine" or "Kevin Sites" was an imitation of content done far better and far more accessible at sites elsewhere (CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, etc.)

And from there things just stagnated further, Yahoo! was forced into a role of playing constant catch up without ever getting the chance to stop and think just who they were as a company, what is the service they provide?

Meanwhile the technology for streaming video was improving. Kids fresh out of film and media schools were looking for new ways to innovate. Looking for new ways to find an audience. A generation that had gone to school considering the Internet to be as basic a tool as a pencil had come of age. Yahoo! probably seems incredibly irrelevant to them.

So today every-where you turn you find quality video streaming effortlessly online. Some of it is cats and dogs making auntie laugh and pee her pants, some of it is courtesy of the networks, and some of it is stolen. Everyone is till trying to figure out how to make money from it. That will come. The days of the first taste is free are coming to an end. As Al Swearengen said of his brothel in Deadwood, "Those were getting acquainted prices." Revenue models will be worked out for quality content. Things that are worth paying for will be paid for. The crap will continue to be free for all those who are fans of it.

If Yahoo! wishes to play in this market it must lose its fear of "what others are doing" and of making knee jerk reactions (buying a property just to kill it a la Flicker). It must poll its substantial user base to discover gaps that are not being served and exploit them. Yahoo! can't compete with I-Tunes, the networks or YouTube. It lacks both the will and the content. Yahoo! can be an effective partner (if it is prepared to be effective) but what it should be doing, now and always, is pushing the boundaries (so get out and push, comrades!).

Onwards!