As an observer of internet and web innovation, a voracious user of hosted applications and ‘Web 2.0′ offerings, I’ve wondered for a long time about something: why have I never used Yahoo products and services in any way and still don’t?

Though I own some stock and been waiting for it to rise (fat chance now), it’s a company I’ve never believed in and one that’s irrelevant to my life. Most people I know don’t use Yahoo either and, out of the tens of thousands of pageviews per month on this blog, a tiny fraction come in from Yahoo….and I mean a tiny fraction (as a point of comparison, Google represents 63% of all referrals with the remainder coming in from blog or website links).

This irrelevancy is one reason why I didn’t care much as the Microsoft acquisition adventure was underway as well as after it had collapsed, though my few hundred shares increasing in value would’ve been nice.

My best guess on why that is can be summed up in one word: beige. In many ways a non-color, beige is the epitome of risk aversion, neutrality, and mass marketing that is the antithesis of where the web is headed. Today’s web is all about connection, personalization, participation and a Long Tail and Yahoo, trying to be everything-to-everybody in a mass media sort of way, doesn’t do any of that.