Can Yahoo find its inner ‘wow’?

I hope you’re sitting down while reading this, because I have quite a shocker for you. Ready? Here goes: Yahoo is going to reintroduce the “wow” to computing.

Yes, you read that correctly. Speaking at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco yesterday, Yahoo chief product officer Blake Irving invoked the “w” word, apparently with a straight face. Per the International Business Times:

Yahoo is investing in products that make people go, “Wow! From Yahoo?” … People will see more rolling thunder and a drumbeat of constant innovation from us.

Wow … from Yahoo? No, he was was not talking about World of Warcraft or Wendy O. Williams.

The “wow” factor hasn’t been applied to anything high tech since Microsoft essentially killed it with its Vista “The Wow is Now” campaign back in 2007, capped by the so-awful-it-was-great “Show us your WOW” website — nice to see it making another comeback.

For Yahoo, the wow has been mostly then, and by “then,” I mean the late 1990s, back when it was still Jerry and Dave’s bookmarks list on steroids. There’s been very little to wow about since.

This is what happens when you outgrow the category you set off to conquer. You find new categories. And still newer ones. You buy up companies based entirely on their name (Broadcast.com, anyone?) making gazillionaires out of their founders, then melting them down into nothing. You overreach. (See also Monday’s “You’ve got Facemail! Now what?” post — overreaching appears to be this week’s theme.) And then you forget how you got there in the first place.

Yahoo the search engine is no more. It’s now Yahoo the content accumulator that uses Microsoft Bing to power its searches. In fact, back in August 2009, Carol Bartz told the New York Times Yahoo never was a search company.

Also: Bill Clinton never inhaled and Michael Jackson never was black.

Bartz certainly hasn’t been sitting still or wasting an entire year playing “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours” with Microsoft. Yahoo has inked a deal with Zynga, allowing the world’s Yahoos to annoy their friends with boasts about the crops they just sowed in Farmville, just like the Facebookers do. It signed on with Groupon, a Web-based coupon service that connects users with deals from local merchants. It’s planning to offer “content optimization” services to other publishers so that a site like this one can show you a different home page than it shows to your colleagues across the cube farm.

Next year we’re promised “rolling thunder and a drumbeat of constant innovation” that’s going to wow us.

What’s that sound, kemosabe? Storm clouds on the horizon? Natives on the warpath? Those beans we ate for lunch? No, it’s Yahoo, getting ready to roll out more wow.

The problem is that today’s Web isn’t a marathon, it’s a series of sprints. And it’s hard to win a footrace when you’re morbidly obese. It’s like expecting Kirstie Alley to beat Usain Bolt at 100 meters.

AOL is in the same leaky boat, though it’s more like a leaky aircraft carrier. Rumors currently swirling around the InterWebs have Yahoo buying AOL, or vice versa. That’s a bit like merging Rosie O’Donnell with Roseanne Barr and hoping to end up with a supermodel.

My unsolicited advice to Yahoo: Shed some weight. Find something you do better than anybody else and focus on that, instead of piling on more stuff everyone already does at least as well as you do.

And enough with all this talk about “wow.”

Is Yahoo’s wow more of a bow wow? Is it possible to throw even more metaphors into this mix? Post your thoughts below or send me an email: cringe@infoworld.com.

This article, “Can Yahoo find its inner ‘wow’?,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringeley’s Notes from the Field blog, and subscribe to Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter.