Yahoo’s New Mission Statement: We Are Not Google

In response to Google’s new tagline, Yahoo retools its mission statement to reconcile its recent social media acquisitions with its origin as a human-edited directory: To connect people to their passions, communities, and the world’s knowledge. Clearly, Yahoo wants to come off as more “human” than Google, whose mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

With this mission statement, Yahoo tries to differentiate itself from Google on three levels:

1) Man versus machine — “Passions” versus “information”.
2) Push versus pull — “Connecting” people to things versus making things “universally accessible and useful” to people.
3) Portal versus search — Yahoo’s already ceded “accessible and useful” search of “the world’s information” to Google, so they’ve decided to “connect” you with a hodgepodge of “passions”, “communities”, and “knowledge”.

So there you have it, folks. If you like a human-pushed portal, use Yahoo. If you like machine-pulled search, use Google.

I don’t like pushy humans. I, for one, welcome our new machine overlord.

oPhone: Microsoft’s iPhone Parody

Microsoft is a bunch of whiners, but they sure can whine in style. Check out their parody of Apple iPhone: the oPhone.

Of course, when it comes to laughable mobile hardware design, Microsoft speaks from experience. Remember the Origami and the Zune?