Strategic partnerships were core to business enterprises seeking to enhance value to their customers and looking for growth, better reach and an effective way of getting on board good ideas, Yahoo Chief Executive Officer Carol Bartz said here today.

"You need to know how to be a good partner. Like marriage and dating you have to work on it," she told entrepreneurs at the NASSCOM Product Conclave.

"You need to understand you cannot build everything", she said, adding that sometimes good ideas may originate in other places and instead of copying an idea, it would make better sense to partner for ideas.

"Companies which have learnt to partner, in the long run will be successful", she said while talking about Yahoo's own partnerships with others.

However, as a word of caution, she said partnership meant strong cooperation and understanding. "We do not try to bully our partners. It is not winners take it all. That will be overtake", she said.

The idea of partnership is to ensure that users have greater access to content and much better reach. "It makes a lot of sense to partner", she said.

Brushing aside apprehensions of dilution if partnerships were struck, she said, there was a need to take some risks to expand and grow.

"Partner with the right people", she said as partnering with some would work, while with others it would not.

Talking about Yahoo, she said Yahoo was looking for great ideas and local content and was open to partnership with local Indian entrepreneurs, who had great ideas to offer. With focus on localisation and expansion into more languages, partnership was important for the company.

The Indian Research and Development centre was responsible for 20 products on end-to-end basis. .

Talking about cloud computing, Carol said cloud computing was a new version of the earlier, Time Share, but more effective. "Cloud Computing was fabulous for small companies, and necessary sometimes for logical reasons."

Having someone else manage the infrastructure could aid small companies. For very big companies, cloud computing could provide agility, she said.

Giving her take on social networking during the session on 'The New Internet: Economy of Scale and Partnership', she said the internet had moved beyond just searching or reading information.

"People want to comment on news stories, rate it, apart from finding what others have to say about a movie, not necessarily just their friends," she said

To a question that young teenagers were hooked to social networking sites like Facebook and asked whether it offered a threat, she said that for a teenager who was interested in her or his set of friends, facebook made sense, but as one grew up, life was much more than that and consequently there would be different engagements one would have to pursue on the internet.

Speaking on the issue of products, she said: "Products were not just about engineering or writing code. Having just a great idea of product in a room, did not suffice. Product management and product marketing were vital as well. Getting an idea tested in a market place, evaluating and revising it was equally important part of the process.:

For women seeking careers, technology, Carol who succeeded co-founder Jerry Yang in 2009, advice was to invest in education.

She said Yahoo, apart from computer science and engineering graduates, was looking for PhD holders in psychology, economics to understand the complex behaviour pattern of consumers. Yahoo also ran a women in tech programme to help women connect with each other.

The long term goals of Yahoo, which has over 600 million users, was to become the largest digital media product content company. It has launched an intensive personalisation drive where every web user would have a different experience.

Innovation, technology and content was the focus. "Our dream is to have all 630 million have a distinct site. Each will have a distinct identity and each of the pages will be automatically originated for them.

We will be on the background working for our users. One of our focus areas will be to education of children in the fourth and fith grade to know how to use internet safely and securely," she said.

To a question on ensuring greater penetration of internet in India, she said it was essential to have acces to bandwith, which has to be cheap.