This is a guest post by southern california based entrepreneur Jeremy Almond:

Many of us in the tech industry today are too young to have seen first hand the days when Apple, Micorosft and IBM set the stage for the personal computer revolution, but of course the story has been documented well. Whether it was through watching Pirates of Silicon Valley, or reading Accidental Empires, we know well that the strategic decisions of the industry pillars then have had profound impacts for the 20 years since.

The news that was widely reported yesterday through TechCrunch, Mashable, and more that Yahoo is outsourcing some portion of search to Google is very likely to be a milestone of the same type of far reaching ramifications as those that occurred in the old Apple, Microsoft, and IBM wranglings of 20 years ago. One might ask, why do we care about who powers the technology behind Yahoo's search advertising business? Well directly, maybe we don't; unlike many of the "experts", I actually don't think that Yahoo outsourcing search is the big issue. If Yahoo can find someone to power some piece of their business better then them and they can make more money at it, more power to them. Classic build versus by decision, and at least for technology, it might not be much of a big deal. What IS a big deal is Yahoo fundamentally not recognizing who the enemy is.

I empathize with Yahoo, back in my own corporate days, I remember the strong disdain we had for Microsoft, locking in companies with poor technology, nonexistent interoperability, and shoddy business practices. Microsoft WAS the enemy no doubt about it. But come on Yahoo, you are supposed to be leading the industry, so let's have some vision here and not confuse what WAS and what WILL BE. In fact, lets not forget history. What was it that took Apple from dominating the original PC industry to letting Bill Gates and Co take the reigns and rule for the next 20 years while Apple got relegated to it's token 2% of the market share (recent iPod and iPhone success not withstanding)? Obviously there were lots of Apple mistakes, but at it's core, Apple fundamentally thought that their enemy was IBM and not Microsoft. At least back then Apple had a lot more in common with Microsoft then IBM and they let the cultural differences cloud their judgment to think the historical juggernaut of IBM was a bigger threat then emerging ambitions of Microsoft.

The parallels here are too obvious, if Yahoo was going to play hardball with Microsoft's takeover bid, because they had some far reaching vision on independence that could have gone head to head with Google that's one thing. But yesterday's announcement show's they had no clue, and fought off Microsoft's bid because of emotion. Where Apple once gave Microsoft the "keys to the kingdom" because they (thought they) needed a killer app to beat the IBM platform, so too we have just watched history repeat itself as Yahoo has given away it's own key's to the new kingdom.



Jeremy Almond is the founder of the San Diego based startup company Travature a personalization and recommendation platform for travel information. Before starting Travature, Jeremy was the enterprise architect at Veeco Instruments, the leading provider of nanotech equipment.