The portal wars shift to openness.

The Altimeter by Charlene Li: Predictions for 2009: "The portal wars shift to openness."

The traditional GYM portals (Google, Yahoo!, and MSN) will complete their shift from competing to be the end-all, be-all for consumers, to one-uping each other on who they can be more open than the others. Google will continue to flog its Open Platform but struggle for adoption against Facebook Connect's well packaged offering. Yahoo!'s Open Strategy (YOS) will make the experience great on Yahoo loyalists on Yahoo.com, but will suffer from acquisition distractions while attracting few new users to Yahoo!. And Microsoft will launch its new revamped Windows Live and online Office services and surprise everyone that the big bad Redmond giant plays as nicely as it does with third parties. The focus of the portal wars will, as it has always been, a battle to convince existing users to stay loyal to the portal site, and not stray or spend as much time on other portals. The turning point will be when users on one portal (e.g. Google) can forgo visiting another site (e.g. Yahoo's fantasy sports pages) because the openness has extended to so many parts of the sites.