This is actually reads like a pretty good list of suggestions for any new leadership team, not just Yahoo. Fire all the "architects" who get paid $250,000 to make gigantic UML diagrams and can't actually code. Pay top dollar to retain and recruit talent. Don't spend a whole lot of time with some broad marketing message that everyone will immediately denounce as meaningless fluff anyway. Stop re-inventing the wheel. Form great teams and empower them to make great products.
I'd just like to add that I think it's important for Mayer or anyone else in this position to do this quickly. If you're two months into the job and you're still having "introductory meetings" with all the departments and putting together "the vision," then by the time you actually start to make any changes, it'll be that much harder because of how much your products have declined and your talent has hemorrhaged in the meantime.
By an amusing coincidence the announcement of Mayer's new job came the day after I finished reading I'm Feeling Lucky[1], the memoirs of "Google employee #59". Its author makes it easy to read between the lines and get the impression that Marissa Mayer was an aggressively disruptive incompetent who could do whatever she pleased because she was sleeping with Larry Page. Whether that's actually fair I have no idea, but the book is interesting. The timing was such that the phrase "short sell!" popped into my head as soon as I saw the news.
Unfortunately, the male-dominated tech world is pretty chauvinistic when it comes to women in positions of power. If she's headstrong and takes no BS, then she must be sleeping with someone in a position of power. Now, I know that MM was LP's GF at one time; but that doesn't mean she's an incompetent person. If it was a guy, people would be crooning, "ooh! he's such a ballsy guy!".
Whatever happened in her past, if Marissa Mayer flops as CEO of Yahoo it will be a damning indictment of female performance as technology CEOs.
Certainly she, out of any X number of totally incompetent past Yahoo CEOs knows what the right direction for Yahoo is. The question will then be one of execution. Yahoo on its own will die, but still has an enormous and valuable user base (much like the cable/pay TV business, which needs to flush out its lying CEOs, but that's another story.)
One additional thing I'd like to see: Really strongly encourage dogfooding. One of the most depressing things I experienced while working at Yahoo was when I'd look around and see all my co-workers using competing email, search, maps, etc products. People looked at me funny when they noticed that I had taken some time to configure my.yahoo.com and set it as my home page. There was no sense of ownership of the various products, so nobody really cared whether or not they worked well.
On a related note, on the rare occasion when somebody did try using yahoo properties and they found an issue or wanted to suggest a feature (e.g. more powerful mail filtering capabilities), the common refrain that typically came back was "You're not the target audience." It was as if yahoo only wanted to cater to the most basic use case. Yahoo needs hiding behind this "not the target audience" crap and challenge itself to make a product that is both powerful enough to appeal to sophisticated users and simple enough to appeal to users with more basic needs. It can be done, and I'd point to Google and Apple as examples of companies that are enjoying much success right now because they've seen the value of it.
What do people do most with their phones? Email, messaging, photos, news, small games. Yahoo is strong in every one of these and more established across the board than all its competitors.
She can leverage Android/Ubuntu because she knows plenty of Unix developers, Amazon is paving the way for non-Google Android products, and the new Ubuntu mobile OS is pretty amazing.
She can leverage Flickr. This is Yahoo's golden answer to Facebook's Instagram, a $1b equal. Imagine a Yahoo phone with built-in Flickr upload and sharing.
She can leverage Yahoo media content alliances to provide a great content-driven phone, with news, music, and movies. I daresay Yahoo can pull ahead of even Apple and Amazon on these fronts.
She can leverage social networking: Yahoo Instant Messenger is a leader, Games is a leader, and Social Bar had 90m users and was a significant leader of Facebook’s Open Graph.
She can leverage Yahoo mail. Yahoo is still a huge player in email, ahead of Gmail in terms of users and IMHO interface as well.
Manufacturing and distribution can be outsourced. HTC is great for this. Start with a small phone, 3G, for mom and pop, and a $99 price point. Compete with the iPhone on price, and with Google phones on content. Subsidize like Amazon Prime.
Most important, Yahoo needs a rallying point-- a bold vision , something amazing to attract top developers and bring together diverse properties. The best way to do this is to go big.
If you're a mobile developer, who do you look to for leadership right now? Google/Android is splintered, Microsoft/Nokia seems DOA, Apple/iOS is walled, Facebook is admittedly behind, and Amazon is just gearing up.
Mobile is where all the action is happening, and it's where all these big competitors are going as fast as they can-- yet none has the mobile space well entrenched yet. This is Yahoo's perfect opportunity to bring it all together, to hire and inspire developers, and build a world-class integrated product. I believe the board knows this.
Yahoo has all the pieces to make this a home run. What they've been missing is the product leader. My money's on Mayer to do this.
Yahoo doesn't need a phone to leverage any of those products. It needs quality mobile apps what people actively want to install, and it needs partnerships with carriers and manufacturers to preload devices with their software to get more people to use their services. That's effectively Dropbox's mobile strategy. I presume it's working.
The Yahoo phone would work in Asia, where the Yahoo brand carries a lot of weight and you already see entrenched Yahoo-branded services (e.g., http://bbpromo.yahoo.co.jp/). In America, I'm not so sure, but it's an interesting idea.
If they really wanted to do this, there is a struggling phone company that will most certainly be willing to talk in Waterloo...
That said, I think this is a bad idea for a number of reasons: 1) they can't leverage the same "total experience" OS/app combo that apple and google can. 2) they aren't in the hardware business, and google has already got a lock on all the non-software vendors. 3) seriously, phones?
One area that they might want to pursue though is cameras, not phones. I'm talking Canon/Nikon here...dslr's are begging for cloud integration and Flickr is right there. That would be 1-2 years out though, and Mayer may not have that time.
Short term solution though would be to ruthlessly cut the fat and focus on high value products. I'm assuming she has a good idea of where she wants to take the company already, but the question remains if the board will let her. You don't go through as many short term CEOs as Y! has without realizing that they aren't being allowed to call the shots when it matters.
Sounds like a step-by-step legacy code refactoring from an engineer :).
I'm sure in the real-world, executing any of the advises will have unknown repercussion.
1. It's hard to fire 10k people _correctly_ and expect things to still work without crushing morale (you may fired potential heroes as well), or perhaps even being poked by government over job losses?
2. I'm not sure a 23 years old hot-shot developer exist. No way Jose. There may be some smart and talented 23 year old, but they're by no mean "hot shot developer". You may get a better result by hiring a 26-32 years old developers. But not fresh grad. Unless your point being to work them like there is no tomorrow, a typical scenario in Silicon Valley startups. Or: today's mess will become tomorrow problem, so you're back to square one with Yahoo! sooner or later => uncontrolled legacy codebases. [Nobody will come out and say that Yahoo has one of the best codebase out there, even Flickr is notoriously bad].
3. Rounding up the smartest people in the planet is hard to begin with, making sure they all can work together without brushing ego is even harder (especially when everyone wants to leave their mark), finally, expecting rainbows and unicorns to show up is magical I would say.
5. Yeah, whatever, BYOD, use standard toolset, sure. If sys-admin needs their BB, be it.
The rest are generics and nothing to complain/argue/discuss.
Yahoo! should definitely shed its fat: people and products, no doubt. Next they should think hard on what needs to be done with the successful products they have left. Once stabilization and culture are in place, then you can start doing something more extreme. Rocking the almost tumbling boat seems to be a recipe to drown everybody.
I know so much of this is a tongue-in-cheek suggestion.
It's one of those, "yeah I meant that" if it turns out right, and, "no, I'm clearly enacting poe's law", when it's wrong scenarios. "I'm clearly joking wink".
Anyway, you could have reduced all of those ten points in to a single bullet point and I still would have upvoted this story.
> Make a huge sign with the phrase ‘the premier digital media company’. Then make a video of you running a bulldozer over it crushing that sign. No one knows what that phrase means. Come up with a goal that people can actually visualize.
This is sooo true. Marissa needs to grab this opportunity and ride the Yahoo-bull-horn for all it's worth.
Ignore investors... Reinvent the entire company that you have stepped up to take charge of.
Marissa needs to change everyones perspective of what Yahoo was, and what it can be.
Yahoo are still on my shitlist from the whole FB debacle. Mayer has already shown that Yahoo can still be "cool", so reinvent everything that once was the old Yahoo.
OP here. My issue with that phrase is that it means both nothing and everything. You can justify any product saying that it fits in with the vision of being the 'premium digital media' company. I once made the point internally that pretty much any website on the internet would fit within that umbrella.
Seems like solid advice. I have an honest question, even if it's a quote from Office Space: What is it that Yahoo actually does? I honestly don't know.
I know they have a random collection of services (news, photos, mail), but if they were to disappear tomorrow, would anyone really care?
You, most of the HN crowd, and myself live in a world removed from the real world. I work for a company which sells fancy business cards and print products to dentists who easily spend more than $1000 on one order, and you know what? They usually have an earthlink.net, aol.com, or yahoo.com email address, and nothing in this world is going to make them change that. I tell some customers we can set them up with your own business email FOR FREE, and they simply politely refuse. Yahoo has the eyeballs of people who actually spend money, not people like myself who want free email and who are trained to never click on an ad.
Your question is not as funny as it sounds. To quote http://money.cnn.com//2012/07/17/technology/yahoo-earnings-m... the market has pretty much dismissed any non-Asian *.yahoo.com properties: "Yahoo's Asian assets are worth $20.5 billion, according to Yahoo's latest financial report: $14 billion for its 40% ownership stake in Chinese e-commerce site Alibaba and $6.5 billion for the company's 35% share of Yahoo Japan. Yahoo's market capitalization currently sits at $19 billion. Ouch."
I am told by sports fans that Yahoo's sports content and fantasy sports leagues are quite good (I have no idea, please don't yell at me if you disagree.)
They also own flickr, which I'm sure you knew.
I am quite certain that people would care if these things, along with their @yahoo.com email addresses disappeared tomorrow. I'm sure you knew this too, because email is central to our online lives at this point.
So okay, you actually do know what yahoo does. What you don't know is their purpose. Google's purpose is to index all the worlds information (and then slap ads on it, but first one, then the other.) Apple's purpose is to make really great products, and then market them so well that people think they're even greater.
So, given what we know yahoo has, what's a consistent product story they could tell that would answer the question that comes up again and again?
I used to think Yahoo!'s days are over but it turns out it's hugely popular in Asia (Hong Kong, India, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan). Search engine wise it's behind Google but it's big when it comes to e-mail, news and all sorts of media content.
tl;dr: there's value in an integrated product that works and is easy to use: just ask Apple.
An 'internet portal' is still very valuable to non-techie users: it provides them a reasonably structured way to access internet services and goods. My email? Here. Stock? There. News? All over the page. Photos? You got it. Chat? Games? Calendar? The weather? Search? As long as it's good enough, it's right there so, sure.
Of course, no future-looking company wants to compete in that market with their own similar product, so until that space gets completely 'disrupted' (what Google tried to with by ripping it to pieces) or 'reinvented' (social networks being the latest incumbent) or completely 'moved' (to a different access model like mobile), many people will continue existing solutions like Yahoo.
We recently released one of our Facebook games on Yahoo. The numbers were not groundbreaking or headline material, but it still surprised us that they were meaningful.
It's surprising how much traffic they still get. Our year-old iOS game was just mentioned in a roundup of "top 10 difficult games" on a Yahoo! Games blog (and it wasn't even linked properly to the App Store), sending sales from 2 digits to 4 digits/day. We were floored that this happened due to a Yahoo post of all things...
Exactly my feelings. They were a search engine I never used, a mail account which only received spam, some mailing lists which were moved to better open-source solutions, and then a "media portal company" which seemed like it just regurgitated content from other sites.
I like some of the products which have come from Yahoo like their JavaScript libraries and YSlow toolkit. However, there are alternative (and in most cases better) options for those libraries so I don't really know what I need Yahoo to do for me.
A lot of you keep asking what it is that Yahoo! does, which is a valid question, but you're forgetting about what they own and what they could do with their properties.
If there's one word that ties all of their more popular services together, it's "social". Tons of people still use Yahoo! Games, Y! Messenger, Flickr, Del.icio.us – all incredibly social communities. And Yahoo! Mail is still widely used.
I think their issue is that they lack an underlying framework from which these services should be stemming. With proper structure and integration, they could really give Google and Facebook a run for their money. Google has been trying for ages to utilize their Gmail userbase to bolster their social plays, and it's worked with varying success. Yahoo! has both the email userbase and the social communities; they just need to find a way to tie the two together into a cohesive social platform.
The interesting one on that list (to me at least) is Flickr. Take the cue from Facebook's Instagram purchase - that photos are one of the critical elements of a mature social community that remains active after other elements have slowed. While Flickr is/was great, it's suffered from neglect. Check out this chart from 2011 showing the photo-library size of Flickr compared to Facebook ... and that was before Instagram happened (assuming that deal goes through), so I can only imagine how it would look today:
Photos aren't just an island anymore ... not just something only uploaded when you plug in your camera. They're connected to everything else you're doing ... and your photo library is sourced from a variety of apps uploaded in real-time as you go about your day. To grow Flickr they either need to enhance the community (maybe in the way 500px has done) or transform it in a way that doesn't piss off the people that go there for professional-quality photos while at the same time carving out a space on the site to accept and leverage photos of what someone had for lunch.
If only they knew what they had several years ago! They had IMO the biggest, most comprehensive 'profiles' service on the web, pre-Myspace/Facebook, and they blew it by wiping all profiles and migrating to Yahoo 360 (or whatever it was called), then called that off, wiped the profiles again, and have a new thing called 'Pulse' that nobody uses.
> I think their issue is that they lack an underlying framework from which these services should be stemming
This is actually what people mean when they ask "What does Yahoo! do?" When you ask that question of Google, for instance, you notice that all the technical branches can be relatively easily argued as coming back to search, and all the monetary branches come back to ads.
Start by fixing Yahoo! Mail. It's become SPAM central, and there's no reason for that. Also, stop charging for POP mail access - is it really worth it? I've been a Yahoo mail user since the 1990's, but if anyone asks me for my email address now, it's gmail. Only because I know my mail that goes there will arrive relatively quickly, and I haven't had my account hacked by spammers ever with gmail.
Don't try to make Yahoo mail look like an online version of Outlook, it gets so cramped. An inspiration to start with would be something along the lines of how mail is viewed on the iPad, but available in the same way on the desktop (yes, many people out there, especially long standing yahoo mail users, still use PC's).
"No more pet projects to reinvent what everyone else in the open source world has already built. Fire anyone who uses the words ‘Yahoo scale’ to debate this with you."
I seriously doubt this is going to come naturally to an ex-Googler.
I didn't really like this one. Oh and hey, don't do anything different. You might as well say "Don't create products that behave significantly different than your competition."
They ought to look at some open source projects and find ways to improve and monetize them. Lucene (bah to solr) might be interesting.
Reading this sort of reminds of that moment detailed in the Jobs biography.
Upon Jobs return to Apple, he asks the product managers to present their current product offerings. They're detailing all sorts of minutiae, differing versions to address different sub-markets, yada yada yada. Jobs waves them all off, draws a grid and says they need four products.
It certainly seems that Yahoo could use a moment like that.
My advice? Take the layers of middle managers who have been there for years, give them their gumball machines or espresso makers, offer to buy out a percentage of their long-underwater options, and make them promise to go work somewhere else.
The inertia is so ingrown there the only way is to cut out the "lifers" who were given their incentives in equity and clog up the system with incompetence or resentment.
Another idea would to stop paying sub-par writers to write the articles that appear on the front page. I can't take a company seriously that employs writers who only get read to see what other facts they get wrong or how badly an article is written (I'm looking at you Chris Chase).
Fixing the quality of the articles would surely have me coming back for more. I remember reading a fitness article about "5 myths of fitness" or some stupid title like that. One of them was that "muscle weighs more than fat". They said it was a myth because a pound of muscle weighs the same as a pound of fat...I was just mortified that it was allowed to be published on a site like Yahoo. By that logic bricks and feathers weigh the same because a pound of bricks is the same as a pound of feathers...
I really like and admire #2 Spend $$ in finding great talent all the way down to the front-line product managers and engineers. This will often mean paying some hot-shot 23-year old coder 5x more than what she would make at Google or Facebook and beating ridiculous counter offers. Do it. That one great engineer will be worth more than the five engineers you have on the payroll today.
However I do not know if there is a easy way (a "litmus paper") that could say she is 5x better. In all seriousness, I'd like to ask how to make such a determination. I think this advise looks good on paper, but really really hard to implement.
I worked on video at Apple. While there, I once got a message on LinkedIn from some recruiter for Yahoo's TV widgets.
Here's the thing: That Yahoo even has TV widgets is why I will never talk to them.
If Mayer can shut all that bullshit down and actually do a small handful of things well enough for people like me to consider talking to them, I think she'll be one of the greatest CEOs in technology.
(I realize this post is embarrassingly self aggrandizing, but seriously, what kind of self-respecting engineer works for Yahoo?)
This is such an interesting inside look at Yahoo, which kind of makes it obvious why they've been faltering. But it also means that there are frustrated people there who want to make great products and services, if they can cut through the bureaucracy and the arbitrary rules. (I don't have recent inside information, so I'm extrapolating here.)
There's so much potential here. I'm still very excited to see what Yahoo will become.
Are there really 23 year-olds making $600,000 per year (=5x what I'm told Google pays) at large tech companies writing javascript? Or is that just hyperbole?
"Make a huge sign with the phrase ‘the premier digital media company’. Then make a video of you running a bulldozer over it crushing that sign. No one knows what that phrase means."
No one knows what that phrase means because no one knows what the hell Yahoo! does anymore. Honestly, why does this company exist? What purpose do they serve? What is their focus? Hire the brightest engineers to build what?? Yahoo! should have died a long time ago. It's just riding a dwindling wave of its past glory.
[+] [-] nhashem|13 years ago|reply
I'd just like to add that I think it's important for Mayer or anyone else in this position to do this quickly. If you're two months into the job and you're still having "introductory meetings" with all the departments and putting together "the vision," then by the time you actually start to make any changes, it'll be that much harder because of how much your products have declined and your talent has hemorrhaged in the meantime.
[+] [-] leephillips|13 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0547737394
[+] [-] ajays|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AJ007|13 years ago|reply
Certainly she, out of any X number of totally incompetent past Yahoo CEOs knows what the right direction for Yahoo is. The question will then be one of execution. Yahoo on its own will die, but still has an enormous and valuable user base (much like the cable/pay TV business, which needs to flush out its lying CEOs, but that's another story.)
[+] [-] noahm|13 years ago|reply
On a related note, on the rare occasion when somebody did try using yahoo properties and they found an issue or wanted to suggest a feature (e.g. more powerful mail filtering capabilities), the common refrain that typically came back was "You're not the target audience." It was as if yahoo only wanted to cater to the most basic use case. Yahoo needs hiding behind this "not the target audience" crap and challenge itself to make a product that is both powerful enough to appeal to sophisticated users and simple enough to appeal to users with more basic needs. It can be done, and I'd point to Google and Apple as examples of companies that are enjoying much success right now because they've seen the value of it.
[+] [-] jph|13 years ago|reply
Mayer has the product experience to do it.
What do people do most with their phones? Email, messaging, photos, news, small games. Yahoo is strong in every one of these and more established across the board than all its competitors.
She can leverage Android/Ubuntu because she knows plenty of Unix developers, Amazon is paving the way for non-Google Android products, and the new Ubuntu mobile OS is pretty amazing.
She can leverage Flickr. This is Yahoo's golden answer to Facebook's Instagram, a $1b equal. Imagine a Yahoo phone with built-in Flickr upload and sharing.
She can leverage Yahoo media content alliances to provide a great content-driven phone, with news, music, and movies. I daresay Yahoo can pull ahead of even Apple and Amazon on these fronts.
She can leverage social networking: Yahoo Instant Messenger is a leader, Games is a leader, and Social Bar had 90m users and was a significant leader of Facebook’s Open Graph.
She can leverage Yahoo mail. Yahoo is still a huge player in email, ahead of Gmail in terms of users and IMHO interface as well.
Manufacturing and distribution can be outsourced. HTC is great for this. Start with a small phone, 3G, for mom and pop, and a $99 price point. Compete with the iPhone on price, and with Google phones on content. Subsidize like Amazon Prime.
Most important, Yahoo needs a rallying point-- a bold vision , something amazing to attract top developers and bring together diverse properties. The best way to do this is to go big.
If you're a mobile developer, who do you look to for leadership right now? Google/Android is splintered, Microsoft/Nokia seems DOA, Apple/iOS is walled, Facebook is admittedly behind, and Amazon is just gearing up.
Mobile is where all the action is happening, and it's where all these big competitors are going as fast as they can-- yet none has the mobile space well entrenched yet. This is Yahoo's perfect opportunity to bring it all together, to hire and inspire developers, and build a world-class integrated product. I believe the board knows this.
Yahoo has all the pieces to make this a home run. What they've been missing is the product leader. My money's on Mayer to do this.
[+] [-] natrius|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] untog|13 years ago|reply
You make good points about Yahoo's content, but they should work on integrating that content with someone else's device.
[+] [-] zachwill|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] verisimilidude|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] run4yourlives|13 years ago|reply
That said, I think this is a bad idea for a number of reasons: 1) they can't leverage the same "total experience" OS/app combo that apple and google can. 2) they aren't in the hardware business, and google has already got a lock on all the non-software vendors. 3) seriously, phones?
One area that they might want to pursue though is cameras, not phones. I'm talking Canon/Nikon here...dslr's are begging for cloud integration and Flickr is right there. That would be 1-2 years out though, and Mayer may not have that time.
Short term solution though would be to ruthlessly cut the fat and focus on high value products. I'm assuming she has a good idea of where she wants to take the company already, but the question remains if the board will let her. You don't go through as many short term CEOs as Y! has without realizing that they aren't being allowed to call the shots when it matters.
[+] [-] ecspike|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edwinnathaniel|13 years ago|reply
I'm sure in the real-world, executing any of the advises will have unknown repercussion.
1. It's hard to fire 10k people _correctly_ and expect things to still work without crushing morale (you may fired potential heroes as well), or perhaps even being poked by government over job losses?
2. I'm not sure a 23 years old hot-shot developer exist. No way Jose. There may be some smart and talented 23 year old, but they're by no mean "hot shot developer". You may get a better result by hiring a 26-32 years old developers. But not fresh grad. Unless your point being to work them like there is no tomorrow, a typical scenario in Silicon Valley startups. Or: today's mess will become tomorrow problem, so you're back to square one with Yahoo! sooner or later => uncontrolled legacy codebases. [Nobody will come out and say that Yahoo has one of the best codebase out there, even Flickr is notoriously bad].
3. Rounding up the smartest people in the planet is hard to begin with, making sure they all can work together without brushing ego is even harder (especially when everyone wants to leave their mark), finally, expecting rainbows and unicorns to show up is magical I would say.
5. Yeah, whatever, BYOD, use standard toolset, sure. If sys-admin needs their BB, be it.
The rest are generics and nothing to complain/argue/discuss.
Yahoo! should definitely shed its fat: people and products, no doubt. Next they should think hard on what needs to be done with the successful products they have left. Once stabilization and culture are in place, then you can start doing something more extreme. Rocking the almost tumbling boat seems to be a recipe to drown everybody.
[+] [-] chrisacky|13 years ago|reply
It's one of those, "yeah I meant that" if it turns out right, and, "no, I'm clearly enacting poe's law", when it's wrong scenarios. "I'm clearly joking wink".
Anyway, you could have reduced all of those ten points in to a single bullet point and I still would have upvoted this story.
> Make a huge sign with the phrase ‘the premier digital media company’. Then make a video of you running a bulldozer over it crushing that sign. No one knows what that phrase means. Come up with a goal that people can actually visualize.
This is sooo true. Marissa needs to grab this opportunity and ride the Yahoo-bull-horn for all it's worth. Ignore investors... Reinvent the entire company that you have stepped up to take charge of.
Don't do what BB's spineless CEO did, and start throwing out quotes like "not much has to change". http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2012-01-22/Blackberr...
Marissa needs to change everyones perspective of what Yahoo was, and what it can be.
Yahoo are still on my shitlist from the whole FB debacle. Mayer has already shown that Yahoo can still be "cool", so reinvent everything that once was the old Yahoo.
</end major rant>
[+] [-] sriramk|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] splicer|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] trotsky|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] martythemaniak|13 years ago|reply
I know they have a random collection of services (news, photos, mail), but if they were to disappear tomorrow, would anyone really care?
[+] [-] rokhayakebe|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MatthewPhillips|13 years ago|reply
They valley makes fun of them because the valley doesn't value profitable businesses, the valley values consumer craze for a product.
[+] [-] prostoalex|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notJim|13 years ago|reply
They also own flickr, which I'm sure you knew.
I am quite certain that people would care if these things, along with their @yahoo.com email addresses disappeared tomorrow. I'm sure you knew this too, because email is central to our online lives at this point.
So okay, you actually do know what yahoo does. What you don't know is their purpose. Google's purpose is to index all the worlds information (and then slap ads on it, but first one, then the other.) Apple's purpose is to make really great products, and then market them so well that people think they're even greater.
So, given what we know yahoo has, what's a consistent product story they could tell that would answer the question that comes up again and again?
[+] [-] runako|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kruk|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jare|13 years ago|reply
An 'internet portal' is still very valuable to non-techie users: it provides them a reasonably structured way to access internet services and goods. My email? Here. Stock? There. News? All over the page. Photos? You got it. Chat? Games? Calendar? The weather? Search? As long as it's good enough, it's right there so, sure.
Of course, no future-looking company wants to compete in that market with their own similar product, so until that space gets completely 'disrupted' (what Google tried to with by ripping it to pieces) or 'reinvented' (social networks being the latest incumbent) or completely 'moved' (to a different access model like mobile), many people will continue existing solutions like Yahoo.
We recently released one of our Facebook games on Yahoo. The numbers were not groundbreaking or headline material, but it still surprised us that they were meaningful.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kalleboo|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] khill|13 years ago|reply
I like some of the products which have come from Yahoo like their JavaScript libraries and YSlow toolkit. However, there are alternative (and in most cases better) options for those libraries so I don't really know what I need Yahoo to do for me.
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] aaronbrethorst|13 years ago|reply
"No more BlackBerries as the official devices at Yahoo."
How is this even possible in 2012?
[+] [-] kyro|13 years ago|reply
If there's one word that ties all of their more popular services together, it's "social". Tons of people still use Yahoo! Games, Y! Messenger, Flickr, Del.icio.us – all incredibly social communities. And Yahoo! Mail is still widely used.
I think their issue is that they lack an underlying framework from which these services should be stemming. With proper structure and integration, they could really give Google and Facebook a run for their money. Google has been trying for ages to utilize their Gmail userbase to bolster their social plays, and it's worked with varying success. Yahoo! has both the email userbase and the social communities; they just need to find a way to tie the two together into a cohesive social platform.
[+] [-] uptown|13 years ago|reply
http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-09-19/tech/30174764...
Photos aren't just an island anymore ... not just something only uploaded when you plug in your camera. They're connected to everything else you're doing ... and your photo library is sourced from a variety of apps uploaded in real-time as you go about your day. To grow Flickr they either need to enhance the community (maybe in the way 500px has done) or transform it in a way that doesn't piss off the people that go there for professional-quality photos while at the same time carving out a space on the site to accept and leverage photos of what someone had for lunch.
[+] [-] swivelmaster|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaredsohn|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saraid216|13 years ago|reply
This is actually what people mean when they ask "What does Yahoo! do?" When you ask that question of Google, for instance, you notice that all the technical branches can be relatively easily argued as coming back to search, and all the monetary branches come back to ads.
[+] [-] michaelhoffman|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dr_|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lukejduncan|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] plinkplonk|13 years ago|reply
Thousands[1] of middle managers throughout the organization would be out on the street -which is probably a good thing?
[1] At one point Yahoo had 300+ VPs (source http://allthingsd.com/20070928/day-73-the-sleepy-attack-of-t...) , so probably not an exaggeration
[+] [-] packetslave|13 years ago|reply
I seriously doubt this is going to come naturally to an ex-Googler.
[+] [-] altcognito|13 years ago|reply
They ought to look at some open source projects and find ways to improve and monetize them. Lucene (bah to solr) might be interesting.
[+] [-] jroseattle|13 years ago|reply
Upon Jobs return to Apple, he asks the product managers to present their current product offerings. They're detailing all sorts of minutiae, differing versions to address different sub-markets, yada yada yada. Jobs waves them all off, draws a grid and says they need four products.
It certainly seems that Yahoo could use a moment like that.
[+] [-] potch|13 years ago|reply
The inertia is so ingrown there the only way is to cut out the "lifers" who were given their incentives in equity and clog up the system with incompetence or resentment.
[+] [-] jetti|13 years ago|reply
Fixing the quality of the articles would surely have me coming back for more. I remember reading a fitness article about "5 myths of fitness" or some stupid title like that. One of them was that "muscle weighs more than fat". They said it was a myth because a pound of muscle weighs the same as a pound of fat...I was just mortified that it was allowed to be published on a site like Yahoo. By that logic bricks and feathers weigh the same because a pound of bricks is the same as a pound of feathers...
[+] [-] ksolanki|13 years ago|reply
However I do not know if there is a easy way (a "litmus paper") that could say she is 5x better. In all seriousness, I'd like to ask how to make such a determination. I think this advise looks good on paper, but really really hard to implement.
[+] [-] CoolGuySteve|13 years ago|reply
Here's the thing: That Yahoo even has TV widgets is why I will never talk to them.
If Mayer can shut all that bullshit down and actually do a small handful of things well enough for people like me to consider talking to them, I think she'll be one of the greatest CEOs in technology.
(I realize this post is embarrassingly self aggrandizing, but seriously, what kind of self-respecting engineer works for Yahoo?)
[+] [-] benwerd|13 years ago|reply
There's so much potential here. I'm still very excited to see what Yahoo will become.
[+] [-] notJim|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sakopov|13 years ago|reply
No one knows what that phrase means because no one knows what the hell Yahoo! does anymore. Honestly, why does this company exist? What purpose do they serve? What is their focus? Hire the brightest engineers to build what?? Yahoo! should have died a long time ago. It's just riding a dwindling wave of its past glory.