
What Yahoo Should Do - terpua
http://blogmaverick.com/2008/12/14/what-yahoo-should-do/
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markessien
I don't think that's a good idea. Yahoo has a problem that it's divisions seem
to be too diverse and unintegrated. Buying even more will lead to a further
lack of focus. Purchasing several web 2.0 apps will lead to a fragmentation in
the attention span of the people managing these properties. You also need to
allocate engineers to develop each item.

What Yahoo should do is own several large sites, and monetize them across a
single integrated brand per site. For example, flickr and the Yahoo portal are
two large brands.

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tom_rath
Yahoo already has content and search properties. They would do well to focus
laser-sharp on how to properly monetize them.

You can speak to any advertiser who has used both Yahoo's and Google's ad
management systems. Yahoo's is awkward and unreliable to the point of
uselessness and many advertisers have completely abandoned Yahoo until that
company gets purchased by someone who knows how to do the job right.

We're not asking much, Yahoo: Just provide an ad-management system which is as
good as Google's was five years ago.

I just spent my afternoon adding a boatload of targeted search advertising to
Google for a new campaign. I'd would have happily shoveled some of that cash
Yahoo's way, but it would be a complete waste of time and money to do that
today.

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ctingom
I was going to make a clever joke about his use of uppercase S in "Microsoft"
but I couldn't think of one.

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zack
Maybe it's an unconscious slip about his MicroSoft member.

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tontoa4
How do I downvote with no down arrow?

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tontoa4
Real mature.

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earle
This is reaching at best. To quote Peter Lynch, I don't think "de-
worsification" is a viable strategy for Yahoo.

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brandonkm
I think he brings up a very good point about acquisitions and yahoo. However,
many questions need to be answered before yahoo can move forward with any sort
of acquisition based strategy. Does yahoo have the cash to buy up relevant
companies that will help them in the long run? Will these companies even want
yahoo stock if offered? What does yahoo's board think about this?

Right now it seems that yahoo is dealing with the fallout from all those
layoffs and finding a new CEO. As good a strategy as it might be, I don't see
yahoo rapidly acquiring companies right now or even in the near future.

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brandong
Why isn't this post appearing at the top of his blogmaverick homepage?

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retyred
oh jesus between allthingsD, valleywag, blodget and blogmaverick, they've
saved yahoo twenty times in the last month in various blog posts. give it up
folks, google won. but if its still an obsession, round up some of the
thousands of former y's around the bay area and just build the company you
keep blogging about building.

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zmimon
Well, speaking of obsessions, I'm puzzled as to why people are so obsessed
with the idea that Yahoo and Google can not co-exist. Why does it have to be
"google won", "yahoo lost" and because yahoo yahoo did not "win" they have
"failed"?

Yahoo is wildly successful by a tonne of metrics, and yet they seem to be
widely perceived as failures. This is something I don't understand.

Best I can explain it is that the tech savvy digerati have moved on from Yahoo
personally and are unable to perceive that in the mainstream, Yahoo is widely
used and liked.

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dotcoma
if only Yahoo! would really embrace its people powered roots, nowadays evident
in Flickr and del.icio.us, and keep these sites independent and geeky, and
useful to feed bottom-up information and content into Yahoo! (remember? it was
a directory 15 years ago), and accept the fact that most of the users of
Yahoo! proper are not super technologically savvy anymore, and create a simple
portal by the people and for the people, and never be afraid of being too
"low" by appealing to normal people's fascination with, well, other people,
famous people, singers, movies, sports, gossip etc.

