Can Yahoo be Fixed?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
But Jerry's in the hot seat here. He's got to find the right things to focus on for the future, in a company that does a lot of stuff already.
By the way, here in LA there's already some wringing of hands in the business press about how the Santa Monica office may be losing some of its movie-producer types and their projects now that Semel's out. Not sure it will happen, but it doesn't sound tragic to me.
Isn't this a bad idea? Isn't this an awful idea? Small agile companies can focus on one corner of the larger garden and nibble on it, siphoning off customers and making a superior product by focusing on having one product that does one thing well.
My insane plan for Yahoo? Spin off tens of seperate units that each develop their one specific product. Have the main Yahoo page be a mashup of these different services, but if a competing product comes along and its better, use it instead. Keep the ad program and share revenue with new partners to keep them around.
Having one company try to do everything will eventually fall apart. Yahoo and MS are further in the cycle, but Google and Facebook are both making the same mistakes, and I think the result will be the same.
The only thing Yahoo still has working for them is the huge consumer base. Some small startups with a fraction of Yahoo's size are also able to charge for services and have revenue sources beyond advertising. A service for which Yahoo users(consumers not businesses) are willing to pay, is there one? Maybe Yahoo needs to be in the same space as PayPal, they have the perfect consumer base(trust and penetration) to action something that facilitates micro-payments. The goal should be to make it as ubiquitous as a yahoo email address was in the past.
The problem isn't going to be solved by bringing in management folks, Yahoo needs a technology upgrade. They haven't done anything amazing for quite some time now - Yahoo is a fairly old company. Not enough hackers graduating from college have Yahoo on the top of their list.
PS: I know they do hosting and other stuff but that isn't a significant contributor to their revenue.
Yahoo needs to look farther into the future and start making some longer-term bets, both in product development and acquisitions. Their market position makes true innovation difficult, though, and they might have to sacrifice the stability of the mid/mass-market, where they've had (albeit lukewarm) success, in order to gain competitive advantage against Google.
Has anyone heard about how well Caterina Fake is doing with the Brickyard initiative? Maybe more of the company's overall strategy should come out of that unit.
Overall, though, Yahoo needs a really solid breakthrough in ad-serving technology-- so much of their money comes from content/ad-serving partnerships with other properties, and a real ad-serving advantage will enable them to deliver a lot more value on those partnerships. YPN is a good start, but it only moves the ball forward a smidge.
Plus the existence of startups implies (since only a few can go public) an opportunity for a very successful company driven by acquisitions.