
Can Yahoo be Fixed? - pg
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/01/business/yourmoney/01yahoo.html?ex=1340942400&en=5fd6d95bc00279dd&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
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zach
Well heck, if Charlie Munger recommends her, she's got to be pretty smart.
Seriously. If she's doing operations, meeting numbers, all that stuff, that
should make Wall Street happier.

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.

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willarson
Is Yahoo's model worth fixing? The massive portal/service centers (Yahoo,
Microsoft, Google) are trying to do everything. To be everything to everyone.

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.

~~~
Keios
I think it is worth fixing.

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.

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joshwa
What they need is an innovation upgrade-- the list of failures of innovation
and indecisive product strategy in that article is frightening.

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.

~~~
joshwa
like this:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32038>

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gyro_robo
Who's Google going to one-up if Yahoo goes away?

~~~
staunch
They'll be relegated to ten-upping Microsoft.

