Since rebuffing Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and dismissing his threat to surrender or face takeover by proxy, Yahoo Inc.'s board and senior management have been desperately trying to find a way of proving to its shareholders that it is viable and competitive without Microsoft.  This week it detailed its new AMP program, a unified advertising platform, that promises to boost revenue and compete with the similar service which Google has had for some time now.

Now in a somewhat ironic twist, Yahoo is appealing to one of Steve Ballmer's most beloved groups: developers!  Yahoo suspects that some developers are a little less lively than Steve Ballmer.  At the April 8th Evans Data Corp. Developer Relations Conference, Yahoo's leader of the Yahoo Developer Network Jeremy Zawodny spoke about the issues of developer laziness and impatience.

Zawodny says that Yahoo's environment is perfect for the lazy developer, as it has lots of APIs that can be had for free.  He says, "There is a lot we can offer without money associated with it."

Some companies he say believe only that developers will be won over by giving them means to make money.  However Zawodny believes alternatively, "developers are lazy and impatient; if you cannot help them make money, give them tools, share your expertise, build a community, let them have fun."

He continues, "[Yahoo is able to] appeal to the true nature of developers. They want free stuff. Developers are too busy to learn a lot of new things, overly optimistic, expected to know about new technologies, lazy—they want to do the least work for the most gain—and impatient—they want it now."

Yahoo appeals to these couch potato developer types in three ways he said.  The first is the free YUI (Yahoo User Interface) library, which is a JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets framework.  YUI abstracts away browser differences to make development easier.  At two years old, YUI currently features 9,000 community members, over a billion files served for people who don't want to host their own, 2 million page views a month, 20,000 subscriptions to the YUI blog, and 650,000 downloads of the YUI source package.

Another key Yahoo technology is YSlow.  This technology helps optimize website performance quickly and easily, especially performance in Mozilla's Firefox browser.

Finally, Yahoo supports and invests in Apache Hadoop.  Hadoop is an open source implementation of MapReduce and the Google File System.  It is used by Amazon and Facebook, among others.  Yahoo has the largest Hadoop production cluster.  Additionally, many of the core Hadoop contributors are Yahoo employees.

"We have adopted Hadoop internally for our search platform," states Zawodny, "We're taking the experience we have and contributing to the open-source project to make it easier for us and make it easier for the world."

There's no underestimating the value of winning over developers, but will Yahoo's unique take of gambling on developers' sloth and impatience pay off?  Only time, or perhaps a Microsoft-driven shareholder battle in three weeks, will tell.