Yahoo Throws Down a Gauntlet in Storage Wars, Targets Facebook

By Jim Lundy

I turned on the TV in my hotel room yesterday and bam! – there was Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer on Good Morning America pitching the new, revamped Flickr photo-sharing site (Yahoo has owned Flickr since 2005). It looked clean, but the bigger story she was telling was: one free terabyte of storage! – larger than any free offer from any file-sharing service, including Dropbox. This post is about the new storage wars that are about to hit consumers.

Yahoo and the Fight to Store Your Pictures

There is a war going on for your pictures, and Yahoo wants back in the game. They made a compelling pitch yesterday, but we think they still have work to do to stop people from sharing their photos on Facebook.

The question is, what’s the right place for your pictures? Flickr is a dedicated photo-sharing site that many professionals have used for years. Facebook is everything for everybody, but photo-sharing is a big part of its franchise.

A Little Help from Apple?

The portal for picture sharing is often the device where the picture is captured, and it appears that Apple just made it easier to go Yahoo, since iOS 7 is rumored to have direct support for uploading pictures to Flickr.

Yahoo and Consumer Buzz

The buzz on Flickr is that terabyte of storage. Today, anything for consumers that is trendy or free gets a buzz movement going. Ms. Mayer is very good at this part of a product rollout, since she honed her skills on consumerizing IT at Google for years.  When I tweeted about the Yahoo announcement yesterday, many friends reacted that they had ‘forgotten’ about their Yahoo account.

Target: Facebook

The Facebook angle may not jump out at people immediately, but photo-sharing is Facebook’s number one use. Yahoo clearly gets that, and if they can attract more users, they can serve more ads.  Given their new alliance with Apple, this appears to be a well-executed plan. We  think it’s the first of many shots that Yahoo will fire at Facebook.