
Ask HN: How would you save Yahoo and bring it back to top place ? - webrakadabra
I loved Yahoo, it was like web equivalent of first crush back in High school. But Yahoo is dying albeit slowly. Compare this to Apple of mid 90's when it was almost dead. Now imagine you are The Steve Jobs and your task is to not only save Yahoo but bring it back to top place. How would you do it ? (Selling out is not an option, please!)
======
lmkg
"Back in top place" of what?

Seriously, answering that question should probably be their number 1 priority.
Right now they can't say that "What Yahoo! does is X," much less "Yahoo! is #1
at X," for any X. They need a direction. Answering that question won't solve
all of their problems, not by a hell of a long shot, but anything that is
effective at solving their problems will necessitate answering that question.

They've decided they're not a search engine. They still sort of seem to think
they're a portal; I don't see a lot of people really caring about portals
anymore, but maybe if they push hard they could bring that concept back. If
they really wanted to be bold, they could try to crack the perennially
difficult nut of monetizing quality content on the internet. If they could
manage that, they could become the go-to content publisher on the web.

From what I understand of their corporate culture, they probably need a leader
that can make changes there as well. They don't need to become Google or a
"start-up culture," but they need more focus on product quality instead of the
treadmill.

~~~
bvi
> Seriously, answering that question should probably be their number 1
> priority.

Spot on. Focus on nothing else but this initially. Remember Carol Bartz's
answer to "What is Yahoo?"?

    
    
        "What is Yahoo? Listen Yahoo is a great company that is very, very strong
         in content for its users, uses amazing technology to serve up what increasingly
         we think is going to be the web of one. For instance, on our today module in the 
         front page, every 5 minutes we have 32,000 different variations of that module. 
         So you don’t even know what I’m seeing in fact we serve a million different front 
         page modules a day and that’s just through content optimization. And that’s just 
         the beginning. Customized because we know the things you’re interested in. Maybe 
         you don’t like light entertainment maybe you like a certain sports team, etc. And 
         our click through rate went up twice. So the point is, people come to us to find 
         out what is going on with the world in a very nice quick fashion to do their 
         communications, email, messanger, check-in on their teens. We all know about 
         Yahoo finance. It’s a places where you can just get it together. It’s collated 
         for you, it’s all the things as you’re moving, you can even get your social 
         information there. Everybody moves through many websites in a day, Yahoo is one 
         they always stop at."
    

Ouch.

Link: <http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/28/ok-seriously-what-is-yahoo/>

~~~
yuvadam
I cringe when I read that.

At the same time I can't help but feel sorry for a company that once really
was synonymous with 'the web' and nowadays has completely lost it's direction.

------
spullara
Yahoo's biggest "problem" is the huge revenue and profit it continues to make.
Jobs had a big advantage when he came back to Apple -- it was losing $1B/year
and was about to go broke. Everything needed to change. When you have a huge
business to screw up, it isn't so easy to make a sweeping change that could
disrupt the business model for years. At Yahoo you could probably cut back to
100 ops people and 200 sales people and rake in billions in revenue and profit
for a decade or more. In fact, most Yahoo! die hard users would like the
message "We are never going to change Yahoo! again. It will remain exactly
like this from now on. No more redesigns. No new features. No changes of any
kind. Your My Yahoo page is safe."

Yahoo's business is driven by the adoption of Yahoo! Mail. Most people that
use it (it is the largest email provider in the US), don't realize they could
put in mail.yahoo.com rather than yahoo.com so stop there on their way to
their inbox. That is enough to power nearly every other media site they
control to the #1 position with the right mix of articles on the home page.

------
brianl
I would turn Yahoo into the curators of the web once again.

(1) Create a group that better identifies and manages relevant and trustworthy
information quickly for popular categories/topics.

(2) Create a group that finds and reports new/interesting websites.

(3) Make Yahoo Answers much better, or buy Quora.

(4) Create a massive user reviewed products database.

(5) Cut the clutter & trash off the webpages. Simplify!

~~~
Hyena
Damn it! 8 minutes too late!

------
jeremymcanally
Nice try, new Yahoo CEO. ;)

All kidding aside, they need to focus on some core products to start
stabilizing their presence again. Give Flickr good leadership. Make Delicious
a priority product. Figure out if the search product is worth maintaining.

Above all, they need someone scrappy and clever to lead, not just contain the
flailing of their tentacles.

~~~
robryan
Their search is outsourced now to Bing, as far as I know anyway, so they can't
really build around outsourced search.

~~~
samstave
I am still reeling from this "strategy" - namely, WTF happened to all the
infrastructure they previously had for search?

Where are the machines, the staff, the datacenters that were in place for
this?

~~~
clobber
Yahoo Search has almost always been outsourced. Even in the early days their
search index was run by a third party (OpenText, then AltaVista, then Inktomi,
then Google, now Bing).

------
makecheck
One of the first things Jobs did when he returned was _streamline_ Apple's
products. If you go to Yahoo.com now, you see about 12 things on the left-hand
side that are essentially "WTF?"; things Yahoo shouldn't be doing (and that's
before going to Everything.Yahoo.com for the complete list of random garbage).
Yahoo should be focusing on its strengths and mercilessly removing everything
else.

Yahoo has always been pretty good at apps: cross-platform Messenger, an
impressive web mail interface for the iPad that looks almost native, etc. They
are a web and design powerhouse, if only somebody told them. This is expertise
that can be sold; they need to continue building a small number of apps to
demonstrate their prowess, and contract this out to develop anything for
anyone (e.g. make Yahoo the go-to place for high quality mobile apps for the
iPhone?). Even throw the free software community a bone by pulling a Nokia
(the old Nokia) and making a Qt-like dual-license so their services have even
greater reach.

Yahoo is also a decent source of news, but they aren't pushing this enough.
With a bit of care and attention they could clean up the mess that is modern
media and give people a really desirable digital newspaper...something that
everyone would want as their home page.

Find and fire the people in their company who build toolbars and installers
that push toolbars. The last thing any company needs is to be connected with
something that users may loathe.

That's just off the top of my head. :)

------
wooster
I'd focus on revenue:

    
    
      - Reduce the number and variety of ad formats.
      - Kill products which are revenue sinks.
      - Focus on products which can generate revenue "out the gate"[0].
    

This gets operating expenditures down, which buys time. That's pretty much all
it does, though.

Then I'd sit back and ask the company[1] "what do we do?" Depending upon the
answer, those are the products, strategies, and revenue opportunities we
pursue next.

My personal feelings here probably wouldn't matter much, because no matter how
intelligent I, or anybody else is, the top 100 creative producers at a company
like Yahoo would probably be more creative, intelligent, in-touch, etc than I
just by stint of sheer numbers[2]. So, take the best of their ideas[3], and
execute on them.

Then, after building up a business which can sustain itself again, I'd start
pursuing longer term goals. These goals would be aligned with what the company
is capable of: large-scale, software-driven, media operations on the web.

During all of this, of course, there'd need to be a lot of firing and hiring.
It'd suck. I'd hate it. But, knowing the tech industry, the people who were
fired would find better jobs, and the new people would want to prove
themselves. The trick is making sure you didn't waste effort on Sisyphean
tasks. Yahoo is not a research company. Yahoo takes existing innovations and
brings them to a mass market. Focusing on that would be a strength.

[0] A rodeo term, believe it or not.

[1] Or, say, the top 100 creative people there.

[2] Finally noticed me stealing plays from the Apple playbook?

[3] By which I mean, "ideas which can make lots of cash in the short term".

------
bugsy
It's a very interesting question. I use yahoo a fair bit for email accounts
and for reading the news. I am not sure how they monetize this activity if at
all.

Recently they forced me out of the old interface with email. Now I can no
longer open emails I want to read by option-clicking on links to open them in
new browser tabs. All mouse clicks are intercepted by the javascript on the
page. Without the ability to do this the email is significantly slower and
less easy to use than before. Now I am faced with finding a new email
provider, and not gmail. If they had just left it alone or allowed me to use
the old. No doubt others feel the same way.

But what do to? Well for news I read yahoo but comment on topix, which is
community oriented. Yahoo should clone that. Unlike topix, yahoo seems to
license their news content which should provide an advantage. Have news
discussion local like with topix. Then sell local classifieds if you get
enough local activity boards going and frequented. Might be hard at this point
though to get people away from topix.

For me yahoo signified privacy and flexibility with the emails. I used to get
news alerts on some topics but they never worked reliably or consistently.
Haven't gotten one in a long time so I guess that feature was cancelled.

Oh I also use yahoo groups. These groups should have cloned the functionality
of ning.com, to supplement and expand the mailing list paradigm. Yahoo groups
have never worked well, screwing up the formatting of most posts and not
having a smooth experience for integrating media. That all should have been
fixed decades ago. Then try monetizing it like ning does with pay for extras
and pay to be the premium ad free host.

A lot of the problems have a vibe that the programmers aren't great, or aren't
around long enough to make things great. A lot has the feel of middle
management dictating features to programmers rather than software designers
being the developers and having the autonomy to own projects long term and
make them great.

~~~
aninteger
I made a comment earlier about the Yahoo mail interface as well and I agree
with you that the new interface is too much. I think they still let you use
the old interface but eventually they will force everyone to switch
permanently.

------
ratsbane
I'd start with Yahoo Stores. PG, RTM, and Trevor Blackwell's creation was
cutting-edge in 1996 but the web has changed a lot since then and Yahoo Stores
hasn't. The store editor would proabably still work with Netscape 3, it's so
non-web-2.0-ish. Even so, a lot of businesses still use it, but that number is
probably shrinking.

With Yahoo Stores up-to-date I would try to position Yahoo as a small-to-
medium business portal. It's a lucrative market and the competition isn't what
it could be (despite the success of Sales Force, Magento, et al).

This would be, or seem to be, a big risk to current revenue, but unless they
are bold enough to do that it's going to fade away in time anyway.

Actually motivating the middle management at Yahoo to do this would be tough.
Perhaps it's time to simplify the management layer and give technical people
more responsibility.

~~~
InclinedPlane
This got me to thinking. Can anybody think of any Yahoo property that appears
to have received more than, say, the equivalent of 6 months work from a single
dev over the course of the last 5 years? Flickr has seen some teeny tiny
changes but everything else seems to be stuck in perpetual stasis.

~~~
ratsbane
Good point. I do remember someone from Yahoo who spoke at the first Startup
School about the webmail redesign - but that was five or six years ago. Why is
everything stuck in perpetual stasis over there? Is it that the leadership
doesn't have the vision to suggest or sign off on major redesigns, or that
middle management can't make them happen?

~~~
ig1
They'be been rewriting Yahoo Mail in nodejs:
[http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/posts/2010/07/multicore...](http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/posts/2010/07/multicore_http_server_with_nodejs/)

------
10zero11
They need a core competency and being a portal is just not worth anything (to
me).

They abandoned anything like search - a pointless skin on top of Bing is not a
product of any value. How many of their users just go to Google?

They seem to have no compelling value add over Gmail / HotMail in the webmail
space.

They seem to have mismanaged Flickr into second place behind Facebook as a
webstore & sharing entity for photos (in my opinion).

Yahoo messenger doesn't seem to be gaining on or offer anything over FB chat,
Gtalk, MSN et al.

So yes like Apple in the 90s, they have lots of stuff some of it cool but too
weak focus and no market leadership in anything.

Unlike Apple they don't have a Steve Jobs and a big pile of cool technology
and talent like NeXT to buy and absorb. Indeed when they do buy in cool
product & talent they seem to mismanage it to death eg Flickr and Delicio.us

A very good question - what should they do?

------
aninteger
I would buy Geocities and then shut it down a few years later. I would start
charging for my free dating/personals site. Then I would eventually shut that
down too as people find other alternatives. I would make sure that my instant
messaging network is closed to outside clients and that alternative clients
have to reverse engineer the the network protocol. I would make sure my search
engine is just slightly better than Lycos and ignore the success of Google.
After all, Google is just a fad.

Ok, seriously, pretty much they need to stop pushing people away. Open up
APIs. Don't get rid of the old mail interface. It works fine. Continue to
offer choices. Don't touch the finance site. Don't touch Flickr. Don't censor
Flickr. Fight spam in yahoo groups. Offer IMAP/POP3 free.

------
eurleif
A lot of Yahoo!'s traffic is from older people. I'd capitalize on that by
creating a social networking site that appealed to that demographic -- sort of
like Classmates.com in that it would have an emphasis on nostalgia, but with
the features of a Facebook-esque social networking site. (Also, no sleazy
banner ads like Classmates.com has. Those ruin the brand for people outside
the target demographic.) The plan would be to grab seniors like Facebook
grabbed college students, then spread to the general population, like Facebook
did.

It's probably unorthodox to expect a site to spread from older to younger
people, rather than the other way around, but parents and grandparents have
badgering power. If grandma really wants you to get a Yahoo! account so she
can keep in touch, there's a good chance you'll at least humor her and get an
account. Then you'll notice a lot of your friends have accounts too and add
them (because hey, why not?). If the site does a good job of appealing to
younger people as well as older people (it's important to strike a good
balance), maybe you'll stick around.

I don't know anything firsthand about Yahoo!'s internals, but from another HN
thread, it looks like they're probably bloated with counter-productive people.
Fixing that in the long term would be important, but probably isn't possible
in the short term; Yahoo!'s corporate structure may suck, but it keeps things
running, and that's important. In the short term, though, it would be crucial
to ensure that the team working on the social network was as unburdened as
possible by the existing corporate structure.

------
kevin_morrill
Michael Dell should make a public statement about how they should shut it down
and return the money to share holders as a good luck charm. I fear in this
case it'd be the right thing.

------
bravura
Grow existing traffic, monetize through innovative ADVERTISING. Most of all,
keep your userbase trusting and preferring Yahoo! products.

Have several independent advertising R&D units, each of which operate
independently and can take big risks on small portions of Yahoo! traffic.

As other commentators have noticed, Yahoo! has a strong brand as a middle-brow
internet presence. A lot of tech-unsavvy users think of Yahoo! as a friendly,
trustworthy internet presence. They have a lot of traffic through mail, and
Messenger is a strong product too.

They should keep spinning out products for tech-unsavvy users, to keep and
grow their traffic, and to strengthen their brand as the friendly, safe
choice. They should acquire and/or brand friendly products as Yahoo! Risk is
minimized on this front because safe, friendly choices are made to grow
traffic and engagement.

On the R&D side, they should focus on innovating in the advertising space,
without turning off their users. They should advertising while driving traffic
from Yahoo! to Yahoo! properties as much as possible. The innovation and the
risks come in the approach to advertising. Big picture thinkers, mavericks,
etc. can each have separate skunk-works labs that they can incubate new
approaches to advertising. Luckily, each advertising R&D unit can test new
advertising models on small portions of Yahoo! traffic.

------
divvlr
I don't know if they do this or not, but they could make an api like google
offering developers a platform to make apps and features connected to the
site. If I were yahoo I would call out to developers and use my name to
attract them.

Google has laid claim to so must virtual real-estate by being the number one
place where developers put all their work for free at that! Google has laid
the way for yahoo why don't they just start copying some of those things. Us
developers have helped google get huge and most of it was free. Look at chrome
with all of it's extensions and apps. They offer a platform to develop give us
"free space" with appengine then we code away giving them more power with
every key stroke.

Now we have the "cloud", the one holding the most data has the most power. If
I were yahoo I would get into the cloud game. People won't leave your site if
you possess all of there music and other information.

I digress with, have people thought about what cloud computing will do long
term. I'm not saying that these companies are out to get us, well they're out
to get our money. But, don't I think they're plan anything malicious. However,
anyone can be hack even google (China).

Some people are just not informed enough to not put personal information in
these clouds. With data mining these companies will be able to infiltrate our
personal lives so much more then we imagine.

Anyway I will stop, and don't get me wrong I love google that was not bash but
more of a passionate thought.

So, if I were yahoo, I would build a cloud, develop an api, attract
developers, and maybe create a news site ran by users.

------
dr_
This will require strong leadership. First thing is you're gonna have to
convince the Board and investors not to simply sell Yahoo off. The changes
have to be dramatic in order for Yahoo to thrive:

\- Simplify it, starting with the homepage. There are way too many things
going on here, and I'm sure a ton of features many people don't use. Yahoo
dating is handled via Match, but most people who date online already know what
Match is, why go through Yahoo? And get rid of Yahoo shopping for now as well,
it's not clear what purpose it serves. \- Focus on the things that count the
most to people. That would include Flickr, Finance, email. Even Yahoo News is
pretty useful. \- Build a social network around your existing email users.
Allow your users to easily incorporate their photos from Flickr. It may be
easier to focus on building a network that is mobile based, rather than
desktop. If you're going to make an acquisition, try something along the lines
of Instagram and then incorporate flickr into it. Then grow it from there,
don't even bother with a desktop version, you won't be able to take on
facebook at this point. \- Getting back to Finance - invest more into it.
There's no reason it can't be a CNBC or Bloomberg. I like reading the
articles, but I'm not entirely thrilled with the video segments and the
quality of the guests, which would typically include some random unknown
private equity/hedge fund type person predicting a financial apocalypse. Big
potential here. You could create an independent channel that is featured on
Yahoo! and maybe partner with companies that will ultimately require more
content as they take on the cable industry, such as Netflix, Apple, etc. I
have a lot more ideas, but it's late and I'm tired. Despite it's criticisms
I'm still a big Yahoo user, for email which I pop (oh, and make it free -
that's just a nice thing to do at this point). I'm hoping they make some bold
moves to enhance their stature.

------
joshu
man. i'd take the CEO job in a heartbeat.

~~~
rdl
So would I (although I'd prefer to do HP; I wouldn't do USPS, though). It's at
least as big a challenge as building a startup.

Of course, with Yahoo, I'd probably be selling a lot of stuff and
streamlining, and possibly sell the entire thing. Still, realizing shareholder
value.

Being a turnaround PE guy would be awesome.

------
gmodena
This is more of a personal wish than a biz plan, but I would like to see yahoo
focusing in becoming a WebService provider, push YAP
(<http://developer.yahoo.com/yap/>) more, merge services and release a
competitor to Google Prediction API.

I have the feeling that Yahoo services are way overlooked, at least in my
circle of devels.

If I had to narrow the target down, I would start by focusing strongly on
Geo(location|tagging|aware) services.

I used Placemaker (<http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/placemaker/>) at a previous
company I worked for and it was not just the best tool for the job but
basically the only viable option to bootstrap our use case (MetaCarta was
great too, but with an higher cost).

------
thrill
Yahoo's existence is unimportant - maximizing the value to its shareholders
is. Yahoo's well played effort to get purchased by Microsoft (at a much higher
share price - nearly 3x the current?) was exactly the move it needed to make
at the time - and it was pure idiocy to not finalize it. The next Yahoo CEO
needs to get the _current_ managers and staff of each department to justify
their profit/loss status - if a manager is not up to that role then find one
who is. Then sell the losses, and put those people to work elsewhere if a
refocus is going to occur. Take what's left and optimize it. Look for any new
ideas that complement the profit makers. And if an offer at 50% more than
market value comes along, take it, damn it.

------
broot
There's a scene I really like in The Wire in which one of the major drug
kingpins realizes that his product (heroin in this case) was inferior and
expensive compared to the other stuff on the market, so he asks his community
college professor what to do.

Rebrand it.

If they want to survive they need to hire a bunch of really, really great
designers and consolidate their properties so that it looks nice, because
their homepage looks like a screencap from 10 years ago. Allow people to
assemble their home pages like iGoogle. Better integrate Delicious and Flickr
into their other properties. Partner with Facebook to add a social component.
Decide what they stand for it and make it contrast with Google. Maybe privacy.
Then make that the drumbeat of everything they do.

~~~
rorrr
People google things, nobody yahoos things. Yahoo is not cool. yahoo.com is a
joke, it's a page full of garbage.

Rebranding might help, but it's very very expensive, and it will only postpone
the inevitable.

Yahoo needs to invent something new.

------
ct
They've pretty much lost the desktop search engine market. The mobile search
is still petty nascent and lots of opportunities for innovation and a market
leader.

So I'd get on the forefront of mobile making it the thing to focus on possibly
partnering up with a hardware device developer. Fork Android OS and make
customizations to it tailored for Yahoo services.

Invest in R&D for mobile search and bring something new and useful to the
table that nobody else like Apple or Microsoft has to wow everyone and put
them back on the map as an innovative company. ie. still lots of mobile
browser inefficiencies that can be improved upon.

Lastly make everything lean and mean, and focus.

------
SingAlong
Yahoo's has struck great vibe with their developer events, the Hackdays
especially. And a handful of their APIs and developer related tools are too
good even today. Yahoo Pipes was way ahead of it's time when it was released.
YQL is one of the coolest APIs I've used. And a few others. Start offering
freemium APIs. Go all out with rapid prototypes that doesn't try to do what's
already there (like what they did with Yahoo Mash).

Right now their homepage seems like they just want to try and make a penny of
anything from Auto to social apps to finance. Shutdown or spin off a lot of
unrelated features & services that clutter their vision.

------
dave1619
I would focus on two things: #1 innovation and #2 revenue.

With innovation, as CEO I would lead a entire division focused on innovation
and discovering the next billion dollar revenue source. Lots of prototyping,
refining, and searching for the next big thing.

With #2 revenue, I would focus on what currently is giving Yahoo the most
revenue and seek ways to grow that. This would provide moderate growth but
most importantly fund the innovation that will be the future of the company.
Anybody ready to vote me in?

~~~
petervandijck
Separate innovation divisions never work.

------
InclinedPlane
Yahoo is just an agglomeration of crap, some of which is successful, some of
which isn't. It only looks like a big thing because there's so much of it. If
I were to take over yahoo I'd break it up into component parts and let them
fare as they will. Yahoo stores would probably do just fine, maybe Flickr
would find some new vigor, as for all the rest, who knows? But it's probably
better than the slow, suffocating decline they're facing now.

------
Ataraxy
Buy duckduckgo and replace yahoo's antiquated search and results layout would
be a great start.

Otherwise, a seriously minimalistic ui overhaul is in order.

~~~
Hisoka
That's laughable because DuckDuckGo is built on the Yahoo BOSS API.

------
abiekatz
Here is a crazy option. Buy Square. Make Jack Dorsey CEO. Square could be the
"PayPal for Yahoo" and Jack Dorsey is probably the closest person to Steve
Jobs that you could get to run a company today.

Allow Square to operate separately, making Keith Rabois CEO of Square and put
Jack Dorsey in charge of revitalizing the rest of Yahoo.

I think Yahoo's suite of verticals with the traffic that Yahoo has, if done
right, could be the biggest asset for Yahoo and the closest thing to a unique
asset that they have. So as a portal, Yahoo links to a lot of vertical
services currently (Monster for jobs, Match for dating) or has there own
owned-and-operated subsidiary (finance, autos, flickr).

Find ways that the verticals can be improved and invest heavily to do so.
Preferably re-create verticals that are currently outsourced, but be patient
with doing so. Be willing to shrink margins in the short term to gain market
share. What is needed for each vertical will be different, but I imagine there
is room for innovation and improvement in each. A lot of personnel changes
will probably have to be made. The CEO (for this example Jack Dorsey) will
need his cadets that he trusts to run the different products. I think a
similar org-chart to Google's reorganization makes sense...a few people at the
very top and then put someone in charge of each product and give them a lot of
responsibility.

I think it may be possible to provide a rich and effective user experience so
that overtime users would go directly to a Yahoo vertical instead of searching
on Google or Bing/Yahoo. Also, Yahoo could then place some results from their
vertical properties on top of the Yahoo search results to better serve Yahoo
users (if they can actually do the verticals right). This could be a very
interesting twist on search and a differentiator. It would be a risk, but I
think something like that is needed to have a fighting chance to grow search
market share which is currently at 17.9% and makes up 53% of Yahoo's revenue.

I wonder WWSJD? In Steve Job's 1997 keynote when he returned to Apple, he
talked about vertical integration being the biggest strength of Apple, even
though many others considered it a burden and a weakness. He admitted that
many current Apple products sucked and that they needed to improved
dramatically improve core products and kill off others in order to be
competitive. He admitted the importance of integrating more tightly with
Microsoft and didn't want to think of the situation as being Apple vs.
Microsoft.

For Yahoo, their nearly complete suite of vertical products is potentially
their biggest strength even though many consider it a burden and weakness.
Yahoo has to admit that a lot of their products currently suck and will need
to kill some off while dramatically improving others. Yahoo already admitted
that they couldn’t cut it in the resource intensive search game and got out.

I know it sounds crazy, but maybe the portal can make a come back. SEO
spammers have dramatically lowered search quality in certain areas and has
made it harder for people to find the content that they really want to find. A
portal can make it easy for the average web user to find what they looking for
with a higher signal to noise ratio by a combination of high-quality curated
content, vertical sites and a Bing-powered search engine with a Yahoo twist.

In reality, I don't know whether Yahoo really has the assets, the cachet or
the people needed to pull off this turn around. If I was on the board, I would
seriously consider a buy out offer if a sweet enough one came to the table.
That being said, this plan would be a whole lot more fun to see being played
out.

------
stevenj
What does Yahoo do?

~~~
ChrisNorstrom
It's a web portal, a collection of lifestyle apps and services that don't
really relate to each other or have a core service holding them together.
Imagine Google without the search, just mail and docs and messenger and that
other stuff.

------
kb101
1) A unified, coherent design language and user experience for the site. This
would really make Yahoo stand out, as even Google is clunky with this ("more"
and "even more"). As it stands currently, it's too visually cluttered and hard
to navigate. Example: I used to use Babelfish a lot, but trying to browse to
it from the front page is well-nigh impossible. Another thought: sort the list
of Yahoo sub-sites by popularity instead of alphabetically. It's fine to have
umpty million different sub-sites, but they need to be coherently organized
and findable. Yahoo really needs a first-class UI, even more than Google or
Bing do, because Yahoo actually _is_ a portal, and a portal is different
things to different people. It needs to be cleanly navigable and this includes
cleaning up the 1990s looking My Yahoo.

2) Back to basics: search. As soon as possible, get rid of the Bing mess and
get back to being a premier search provider. Type nearly any topic into any
search engine and you get a Wikipedia page first thing. If I type "hacker"
into Yahoo, out of the top ten results, there are five junky results: 2
Wikipedia pages, one Answers.com page, one Dictionary.com page, and one WordIQ
page. If I want to get a definition or an encyclopedia page, I can go to those
sites. Web search is supposed to pull up awesome cool links from the web, not
the standard junk pages that have shallow content and are not hard to find.
Even Google is getting infested with these kind of crap results. Nowadays, if
I find an awesome link it is typically via a site like HN or somebody's blog,
but I remember the days when I used to love going to Google and digging up
fresh new links that were interesting.

3) Social is still "ripe for disruption" as they say. The flurry of interest
around Google+ is evidence of this. People want more control, and more
privacy, and a greater ability to differentiate their online identities
without any one identity compromising the other. Eric Schmidt's response to
this is "well if you have something to hide blah blah blah" but it's not about
having something to hide. It's about the fundamental human need to interact
differently in different social and economic settings. Maybe the guy who works
as a cube jockey in some corporate wasteland needs to have his LinkedIn
profile for trying to make it to the next level, but what about his sideline
trying to network his way into a graphic design job? Maybe he needs a couple
of profiles and wouldn't like to have to use his real name on either.
Innovative approaches to allowing flexibility and growth on social sites
(isn't that what the web is supposed to be about?) instead of locking people
into one idea that they damn well better stick their RealName(tm) on... that
is an area where Yahoo could step in and fill a void. Particularly if it was
done right, and done in a way to leverage their existing myriad of user bases
across the niche sites.

4) Quality. (Echoes of Steve Jobs and his quest for the perfect shade of
yellow in an icon.) An enterprise-wide push for quality would help. Instead of
being meh at 100 things, Yahoo could easily be awesome at those same 100
things. They already have the infrastructure in place, they just need to clean
house and remodel. (This kind of ties back to point 1.) Flickr is a prime
example. It's big, it's a brand name, it has a loyal user base, but it isn't
awesome. It needs to be awesome.

5) Develop an identity. If the preceding four steps are done right, this will
follow. Google's identity is "search plus a bunch of other crazy shit, and
they have really cool offices to work at" right now. It works for them because
search (advertising) makes them so much freaking money. But it's not really a
coherent identity. Yahoo's identity could easily be "the coolest web portal
with the best links". If Yahoo became synonymous with premium quality, they
would be unstoppable.

~~~
sixtofour
To your point 5, yes.

Google is cool because it lets you search for cool stuff, but they aren't
anything identifiable except as they find cool stuff for you. gmail and plus,
sort of, I guess.

Yahoo can BE cool stuff.

~~~
sixtofour
Ah, I see they're for sale.

Well, maybe they can be a bargain.

------
gcb
yahoo power is eyeballs. because it has 'premium content'? HELL NO!

front page PVs skyrocket when it redirected the email logout to it... so that
proves NOBODY goes to the frontpage for 'premium content'

people go to yahoo for the assorted free stuff(tm).

does it's email need to be the best one? no, but it's ok and free. and you
already see lots of @yahoo around, so why not?

Will people still use flickr even if it lacks 'social networking' features and
ugly themes? quite probably. Should they ditch flickr and 'focus' on display
advertising and 'premium content'? hell no.

Does babel fish needs to be better than a paid translator? hardly. but it
still kicks google translator butt. sadly nobody that arrives to yahoo now
will even know it exists.

Bottom line is:

everyone has found memories of yahoo. But for some it was geocities, for some
it was their first email... for others it was the way to find pages. heck it
may even be because of the cool TV ads!

yahoo should be monetizing this by inventing clever ways to put Ads on those
in a manner that isn't offensive.

But no, disregard all that. let's steer yahoo into AOL foot steps. Everyone
wants to read about hollywood stars and wacky red neck oddities while a 'hit
the monkey' flashing ad fights for their attention.

------
rorrr
Yahoo lost. It's the new AOL. It has a few nice products, but only a miracle
acquisition will save it.

