
Where it went wrong for Jerry Yang - davidw
http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=12597041
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startingup
Yahoo is a classic 1990s land-grab story: go public, use the inflated stock to
grab as much territory as possible. In that game, they out-executed everyone
else (Lycos, Infoseek, Excite ...) Keep in mind Viaweb was one of their minor
land-grabs!

Inevitably, this process destroys the soul of the company. The people who sold
them companies mostly didn't stick around (pg!) because they realized there
was no soul.

It is very hard to repair such companies (I never say impossible, but very
hard!). The comparison is _not_ Apple, because Apple was never built that way.
Even in its darkest hour, it had a soul. To give a more relevant contrast, I
believe Sun can be repaired, but alas, the longer management fiddles, the more
difficult the task becomes.

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gruseom
I would say things went wrong _with_ the choice of Semel to Hollywood-mediaize
the company, not with his departure. Yahoo lost its soul while Google didn't.

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jm4
Yahoo had already gone bad before bringing in Semel. I think it started during
the dot com craze. They had no focus or direction. They were basically
becoming like AOL. In fact, that's most likely the primary reason they picked
up Semel in the first place. The decision had already been made to be
everything for everyone and he was supposed to be the leader to help get them
there. Do you remember when they were also an ISP and had a lame magazine?
When the crash came they were ditching services and divisions left and right
and have really never focused on anything since.

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gruseom
You're probably right that it was a symptom not a cause.

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danx0r
Yahoo's failure is simple: they didn't stick to their knitting. I was a long-
time user of Y mail and liked some of their other stuff (finance.yahoo...) but
quit in frustration recently, the third time their search button failed to
find emails I could see plainly in the Inbox.

Find something you're good at, do it better than anyone else, and keep doing
it until it doesn't work anymore. Yahoo failed to do any of these things --
they've thrashed around for years, and don't bother to hire competent people
to do the few things they were once pioneers at. Very sad.

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ardit33
Spinless leader. He should have fired half of the middle-managers right away,
and some dead woods in his exec team, and reward well who is left.

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jrockway
Or he could have a product that people want to use. The problem with Yahoo is
not middle management, it's that they are irrelevant. (Flickr is nice,
though.)

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markessien
The most popular website in the world is irrelevant? So what's relevant then -
reddit?

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jrockway
Popularity is what you need in high school. Yahoo needs some money.

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known
Yahoo is doomed.

