Could the Cloud Save Yahoo?

Om Malik posted a great blog about Yahoo following Jerry Yang's resignation and the search for a new CEO. Among other things, Om lists some of the things Yahoo should and shouldn't do now. Some of the items in Om's "should do" list are:

• Focus its energies on Yahoo News, Yahoo Sports, My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Flickr, Yahoo Messenger and Yahoo Search, as well as Yahoo’s e-commerce platform.
• Keep building on its Mobile offerings, for this is one area where its independence can help it win friends amongst operators who are worried about Google, Microsoft and Apple. 
• Yahoo’s ad-serving platform needs to become more real-time, with a drastic improvement in customer service.

While all of the above (and the other things Om writes) seem like good advice, I think there is one thing missing: cloud computing.

For the past few months whenever I tried to speculate on who are the next major vendors that will go into cloud computing, Yaho always initially was high on the list. But after some further thought I had to move them down, because they first need to get their act together as a company.

As I wrote in a comment to Om's post, Yahoo is exceptionally well-positioned for cloud computing with technologies such as Hadoop and Pipes and in-house expertise in building and running extremely scalable infrastructure. In addition, the next phase in cloud computing is going to revolve around Platform-as-a-Service. This is where Yahoo can really shine, especially compared to Amazon.

Moreon that in a future post.