Yahoo Reaches Out to Couch Potato Developers

Yahoo knows that some developers are less lively than others

Since rebuffing
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and dismissing his threat to surrender or face
takeover by proxy, Yahoo Inc.'s board and senior management have been
desperately trying to find a way of proving to its shareholders that it is
viable and competitive without Microsoft.  This week it detailed its new
AMP program, a unified
advertising platform, that promises to boost revenue and compete with the
similar service which Google has had for some time now.




Now in a somewhat ironic twist, Yahoo
is appealing to one of Steve Ballmer's most beloved groups: developers!  Yahoo suspects that some
developers are a little
less lively than Steve Ballmer.  At the April 8th
Evans Data Corp. Developer Relations Conference, Yahoo's leader of the Yahoo
Developer Network Jeremy Zawodny spoke about the issues of developer laziness
and impatience.



Zawodny says that Yahoo's environment is perfect for the lazy
developer, as it has lots of APIs that can be had for free.  He says,
"There is a lot we can offer without money associated with it."




Some companies he say believe only that developers will be won
over by giving them means to make money.  However Zawodny believes
alternatively, "developers are lazy and impatient; if you cannot help them
make money, give them tools, share your expertise, build a community, let them
have fun."



He continues, "[Yahoo is able to] appeal to the true
nature of developers. They want free stuff. Developers are too busy to learn a
lot of new things, overly optimistic, expected to know about new technologies,
lazy—they want to do the least work for the most gain—and impatient—they want
it now."



Yahoo appeals to these couch potato developer types in three
ways he said.  The first is the free YUI (Yahoo User Interface) library,
which is a JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets framework.  YUI abstracts
away browser differences to make development easier.  At two years old,
YUI currently features 9,000 community members, over a billion files served for
people who don't want to host their own, 2 million page views a month, 20,000
subscriptions to the YUI blog, and 650,000 downloads of the YUI source package.




Another key Yahoo technology is YSlow.  This technology
helps optimize website performance quickly and easily, especially performance
in Mozilla's
Firefox browser.



Finally, Yahoo supports and invests in Apache Hadoop. 
Hadoop is an open source implementation of MapReduce and the Google File
System.  It is used by Amazon and Facebook, among others.  Yahoo has
the largest Hadoop production cluster.  Additionally, many of the core
Hadoop contributors are Yahoo employees.




"We have adopted Hadoop internally for our search
platform," states Zawodny, "We're taking the experience we have and
contributing to the open-source project to make it easier for us and make
it easier for the world."



There's no underestimating the value of winning over
developers, but will Yahoo's unique take of gambling on developers' sloth and
impatience pay off?  Only time, or perhaps a Microsoft-driven
shareholder battle in three weeks, will tell.