This is my promised follow-up to How Not to Run Yahoo, so I suppose this should have been titled How to Run Yahoo, but I’m too much of a smart-ass for that. I spoke to a bunch of smart people (past and present Yahoos) some of whom even allowed me to print their names, and here’s our consensus view on what the next Yahoo CEO really has to do to turn the company around. I’m sorry it all sounds so negative, but it is toward a positive end, remember.
Yahoo has a bureaucracy problem that I attribute to former CEO Terry Semel, who hired legions of vice presidents to insulate the former Hollywood studio boss from the rude fact that he wasn’t, anymore, a Hollywood studio boss. Since Semel didn’t seem to get what Yahoo was about, he hired lots of people to keep him from having to personally deal with it.
Here’s how my friend Randy put it: “My beef with Yahoo is that they have way too many layers (I might have the exact titles wrong, but the number of layers is right) — associates, senior associates, managers, senior managers, directors, senior directors, general managers, VPs, SVPs, EVPs, regional presidents. This is absolutely crazy. They have more VP-level employees than you could ever imagine. Their product and engineering talent sits under all of these layers. It’s no wonder they’re not a technology company anymore. That’s what they need to fix first — flatten the company. Firing a bunch of senior execs who can’t get it done and not replacing them would go a long way. No more senior directors, no more GMs, and way fewer VPs and SVPs.”
Step one, then — fire the executive fat.
Step two is all me: reorganize business development and place it lower in the organization. Biz-dev at Yahoo seems mainly intent on not doing deals, which may be a safe bet for a high tech company that wants to die, but not for one that needs to reinvent itself like Yahoo does. We’re starting to see similar behavior, too, at Google. Place the decision making authority where the knowledge is, as they used to say at Intel but apparently never said at Yahoo. It’s time to let divisions manage their own deal flow.
At this point I was blessed by an e-mail from Larry Tesler, former head of customer experience at Yahoo as well as chief scientist at Apple and some similarly impressive title at Amazon.com. Larry, one of the smartest and nicest guys you’ll ever meet put it right on the line. His advice for Yahoo is below and it feels right-on to me. If the Yahoo board self-decimates as seems to be expected, I think Larry deserves one of those open board seats. He’d be a big help.
“If I were running Yahoo! with the goal of turning the business around, what might I do? asked Larry, repeating my question. “You can quote any or all of what’s below in that context.
“First, I’d be sure that retention incentives for top innovators and operators were in place. Then I’d embark on a three-year disciplined turnaround. I’d identify a few existing businesses that are profitable and competitively strong, boost them by updating features, user experience and operational efficiency, and sell or shut down everything else.
“I’d liquidate the Alibaba stake, probably a little at a time, to generate cash.
“I’d pick a dozen exciting ideas for breakthrough services. They could come from the patent portfolio, Yahoo! Research and other internal sources. Or from acquisitions of unique, patent-protected technologies. I’d focus the innovators on those and keep the operators away (my emphasis here –Bob). I’d introduce one or two such services a year and invest heavily in their marketing, customer service and product quality.
“At first, I’d focus one third of executive staff meetings on the progress of business exits, one third on the needs of the remaining businesses, and one third on the maturest innovations. Over time, these proportions would change. I’d make long term strengthening of the brand a factor in every major decision.”
If you wonder why Carol Bartz is gone it’s because she didn’t seem to do any of this. Maybe she wasn’t allowed to or maybe she just didn’t get it. Hopefully the next Yahoo CEO will get it.
Bob, I just LOVE your posts and your thinking! Have done for years!
Hey Bob, here’s a column idea: the “hey, I agree” posts (like the one I just replied to). Lately they seem to be more and more frequent. There’s no URL in there, so it’s not pure spam. But there must be a reason – to game the system somehow. My bet is something to take advantage of benefits given to “regular posters”, although I don’t know what sites do those or what the benefits would be.
Not too hard to figure out.
It looks like someone who just wanted to be the first to post. It’s always fun to be number one, even though it doesn’t mean anything. In this case, it means absolutely nothing.
I introduced an avid gamer friend of mine to Turntable.fm. I went over a week later and he was DJing with the sound off. He didn’t care about listening to music, he just wanted the completely meaningless DJ points. Just something in the way some people are wired.
The post is generic and meaningless. It was probably auto generated by a lurking bot. Bob, is somebody finding your range?
is it really so painful to read a positive comment on the web? i’m more bothered by “meh” spam like your post, frankly. i get it: you’re snarky and you’re bored, but please go correct somebody’s grammar on youtube and stop wasting my time.
It’s hard to argue with any of the above but you’ve got to wonder whether the Yahoo brand is so degraded as to be beyond salvage.
It’s interesting to compare the Google and Yahoo search homepages. One, lean, stripped, minimalist and classy; the other choked, crammed and cluttered with “stuff”. I wonder if it’s not an allegory of the way the two companies operate.
Do you remember how Excite and Infoseek went from being a search engine to a portal and finally vanished? Yahoo’s page is sort of in between.
The lean minimalist look gives the user exactly what they want – search. Strip it down again and user numbers will increase.
And Lycos?
You mean strip Yahoo! to look like Google? That won’t work; Yahoo! can’t possibly compete with Google on Search. Their strengths lie elsewhere.
The portal game is dead, the Search contest is over. Yahoo! makes money from other things and has to look further in that direction.
I mean that the main page of Yahoo is bloated. Strip away a lot of the clutter and simplify the design. Do less but better.
Yahoo does have a superb name, it’s one that many people have heard of. So brand wise it’s fine. However, even though it’s search and email is very good it’s not the first choice because you now look to cleaner website.
I hope that when/if Yahoo shuts further properties down, they’ll wisen up with respect to salvaging user-generated content, instead of being the despicable joke-butts of the Archive Team.
I remember the point where I switched my home page from Yahoo to Google. Early Yahoo wasn’t about search, but organization. You could go to the News section and find not news, but links to the big news areas. You could go to Science and find not fluff pieces, but links to science journals. Searching Yahoo would first search their table of contents, then whatever else was out there.
What started happening is that Yahoo went from a table of contents of information, and finding that information into a Portal. The search box went from the middle of the top to some back corner. The table of contents started to disappear and be replaced by Hollywood gossip and sports.
Even search was no longer good. Not because I got bogus pages, but because of all the damn ads. 1/2 of the search results on the first two pages were intermixed with paid links. I started to get the feeling that I was no longer a user of Yahoo, but a product for advertisers.
I had also used Infoseek and Excite, but they also started to resemble Yahoo’s page. Meanwhile, Google was nothing but search. No decorations, no push, and minimal ads (which were well marked as ads).
Google searching with page rank was nice, but the main thing is that I felt that when I did a search, I was getting honest results, and that Google wasn’t trying to get me to do something else.
Even today, Google’s search is fairly pure. For example, I searched for “cringley” (purposefully misspelled) and Google told me it was going to search for “cringely” instead. That’s useful. I have about 100 search results on my first page, and not one ad. The main Cringely page is shown on top with the main links from that page. I can go right into the section I want without visiting the main page. That’s pretty much what I want.
Go to Yahoo, and I have a flashing ad on the right side. On the left is a list of Yahoo sites I am not interested in visiting right now. There’s a list of “Trending” (what ever that means), and a link to a “captivating NYC tribute”.
If Yahoo is to succeed, they need to stop pushing stuff at me, and let me use them to get what I want.
David W. absolutely nailed it. That’s what’s been wrong with Yahoo for YEARS. That, and as I previously mentioned, when they got so SLOW with reviewing new sites, and finally started charging $300 to be in their index, … just as they were moving that index off the home page!
Yes. Too little focus which means too much of everything else.
Who knows if it was her or the board or both. I never heard about any grand plan that wasn’t able to be carried out. For most, staying the course is comfortable—even it leads to the edge of a cliff.
Very good points, David W. I tried to go Google free using Excite and Yahoo mail ‘n search and found the same as you. I’m back to Google search and not sure any email change is worth it either. Damn. When the devil’s so much better than the monkey, its difficult not to lie-down with him.
Excellent points by David. I never use the Yahoo main page. It’s too busy and I find it annoying. I use Google for search, because it’s pure and simple. My loyalty to Yahoo is the email and the “My Yahoo” that I can customize. I love both. I don’t use Google’s equivalent because I have a certain “trust me” that I associate with Yahoo that I have never been able to associate with Google. Google is the “nosiest company in the world” and I value their nosy-ness for searching. I don’t value their nosy-ness for email and configuring a front page. Of course, I could be naive in “trusting” Yahoo. 😉
Flashing anything should be removed from any legitimate company page.
Funny, I can specifically remember when I finally changed my home page from Yahoo! to Google, too.
You can find images online of Yahoo.com through the years, and I think it’s an interesting study in feature creep. I really liked Yahoo!’s combination of curated directory and plain text search, but after a while there just got to be too darn much stuff on that ugly front page.
Amen. Yahoo! was the winner of the Portal game, which ended in 2000 or 2001. Since then the average user behavior has moved beyond portals to niche special interest sites for specific info and social networks for general platforming. The internet changed, and Yahoo! didn’t. (AOL, anyone?)
The lesson is never bet on a company which relies on the internet/tech consumption/gadget interaction to stay the same. Microsoft, Comcast, RIMM, Sun, and eBay, I’m looking at you.
> I searched for “cringley” (purposefully misspelled) and Google
> told me it was going to search for “cringely” instead.
I tried this as an experiment on the now-despised search engines
like Yahoo, Excite, Lycos, Altavista, Infoseek, and even threw in Bing.
I typed “cringley” (purposefully misspelled as you did) into the search
box and pressed enter. Well, guess what? The top result on *all* of
them was “I, Cringely – Cringely on technology”. In other words, all
of them auto-corrected and found our Cringely.
I hate the clutter of Yahoo as much as anybody, but I genuinely
wonder if my preference for Google is driven more by look-and-feel
than by the quality of the underlying search algorithms.
My main comment wasn’t that this was a unique feature of Google, but the fact that this would be a feature I would want and find useful — unlike flash ads, Hollywood gossip, and content farm created dreck.
Someone had to think “What would our users want?” rather than “How can I monetorize our user base?” It’s why Google is Google and AOL/Yahoo/Excite are who they are.
I still use Yahoo! as my landing page. I would never use it for search but it’s slightly above average as a landing page. I did use Excite as my landing page quite awhile back but as they experienced financial challenges their website quality/value went thru the floor like a rocket.
For Yahoo! I do have some feedback….
– Users should be enabled to REALLY customize the landing page, not feel like they are buying a Model T from Henry Ford….
– 1 click to read an article instead of 2. And guess what…. clicking down to an article fails alot. Make it work consistently.
– Email continually has problems (increase in failures seemed to coincide with the arrival of Ms. Bartz). Fix them. Make it bullet proof. Also, enhance the administrator capabilities.
– Stock Portfolio – make it easier to use. Its a real pain to edit and many times any edits @#$#%#@ up the table. If you want people to come back/stay on your website make this tool better!
Add a me too to the above, every single point in fact.
Over the years I have repeatedly reported broken features in Yahoo finance. Obvious things that anyone could see if they even bothered to look at their own page for 10 seconds. Several times various people replied to me… but they never fixed anything. A company with problems like that is beyond repair. They simply don’t have the will to compete any more. It’s like an elderly cow that just lays down and waits to die.
I laugh when I read tired old cliches like “flatten the org”. As if shuffling around a few clueless managers ever accomplishes anything. Anyone who’s ever worked in tech knows what I mean. Only the engineer level and maybe the first 2 levels of management even know what’s going on. The rest just spend all day playing politics and pretending to be smart and busy.
My home page about:blank. The whole concept of home page in a distributed network seems plain wrong to me.
Same goes for focusing on existing tech, is Yahoo or do they want to be a search/tech company or a media distribution channel?
If they figure out what they want/can be, then where do they want that tech/channel to be in 5 years and how do they get it there?
It’s to late for another round of Spreadsheet driven “innovation”.
[…] Many media companies struggle with adapting to real change. There is a propensity towards trying to preserve the well-known and well-established and fail to cut the cords that need cutting. Yahoo! is just one blatant example of such a company which urgently needs a fixer with absolutely no sacred cows, as Robert X. Cringly rightly suggests. […]
None of the people with “fixes” for Yahoo seemed able to define a reason for the company to exist. Does anyone really know what they do? I can’t think of a single stand-out product or service that represents Yahoo. One guy says cut the fat (duh) and another suggests cutting fat and lots of meetings.
I’ll bet some clever tech blogger could find a way to convince investment bankers to strike a deal and merge Yahoo with HP, RIM, and AOL. Call it Yaprimhole. Heck, put a cherry on top and make Nathan Myrhvold the CEO.
The concept of a “portal” runs counter to how modern web browsers work. Current browsers can default to the set of tabs last open by the user, automatically. Much more useful than a “home page”.
Besides, the number of interesting websites to users has grown many times since Yahoo’s heyday. I have seven categories of favorite websites with a couple dozen sites in each category. Each site was chosen based on my own personal interests, has current content and its lack of “annoyance” factor.
Some sites that got axed from my bookmarks because of annoying content:
Yahoo (a long time ago, the day after Google started up I think)
MSN (heh, the first day it was put online)
AOL (account manager CARL ANDERSON refused to cancel my account)
Techcrunch (see above)
Gizmodo (mm, mm, can’t get enough of those daily references to porn)
Engadget (gotten too commercial)
HardOCP (poor editorial judgment, good luck getting Texas S&M in the SEC, redneck wanker)
Candidate for exclusion:
Ars Technica (for not including notice of important upgrades of software, a glaring omission for a tech oriented website. Kudos to Tweak Guides for their exhaustive coverage of updates to programs and OSs.)
I think you nailed it: Yahoo! is obsolete because BROWSERS have become so much better since 2000. Today’s Chrome, Firefox, or Safari versions are like portals themselves, but superior and with more controls.
Who needs a portal when you can pilot the ship?
Both MSN and Yahoo are highly customizable so that you can glance at the headlines from dozens of your favorite sites all on one page. For me they are not a landing page or a portal or a search engine. They are merely “headline news pages” from which I can read more about topics of interest to me, when I’m in the mood to do just that. (Yahoo does have an interesting popup way of displaying more of the story without having to leave the front page at all.)
seven plus or minus two
on bookstore shelf or google page,
how many items do we view ?
ads on pages and sidebar space
what is enough and not too few ?
how many things til our working memory’s through ?
proper positioning of what at one time we can view
this is what yahoo needs to now do
in seven items, plus or minus two.
—————————————————————————————
but seriously, as an exercise, I am organizing hundreds to thousands of items such that they can be usefully browsed. This has gotta be done in a graphic, not a paragraph paradigm.
http://www.nerdpocalypse.net
(a nerdpocalypse net is an hierarchical, reiterative, isomorphic, n-dimensional array of information –a semantic web of links would be a fast way to think of it).
Aggregating the first 100k items for display acts like a content provider and fits with Yahoo’s current assets. As more items are added beyond that, additional bing-like features emerge. But Yahoo has to go value-added through a graphic environment.
Who cares? FO spam tard.
I’ve found the perfect example of Yahoo’s failure and what they have to change. On the bottom of their page are links to “More Yahoo! Sites”, and one of those links is to “Associated Content”.
Associated Content is a site no one ever purposefully went to. Instead, the whole purpose of Associated Content was to get you to accidentally click on their link, so they could show you ads. Their content is based upon popular searches, and their stories are written to have as many buzz words as possible to rank high. You clicked on an Associated Content link because it came up on your search results, not because you liked the site.
Associated Content whole purpose was to game the Google Search business. It didn’t care about readership or the quality of their content. It didn’t care about drawing a faithful base of readers. It didn’t even care about its advertisers. It merely wanted clicks. It was a content farm with poorly written articles and shoddily produced video.
In the end, the whole business collapsed as Google changed their page rank rules to stop sites like Associated Content from polluting their search results. Associated Content’s empire collapsed into a smoldering wreckage — and that’s about the time Yahoo bought them!
yaWHO?
Are they still around?
Nailed it. Direct hit!
“…Terry Semel, who hired legions of vice presidents to insulate the former Hollywood studio boss from the rude fact that he wasn’t, anymore, a Hollywood studio boss.”
That sums up just about EVERY Hollywood exec. These are guys who will green light a project without ever having read it. This isn’t the slush pile, just two or three scripts upon which a multimillion dollar investment hangs by a thread. Does he ever read them? No. Why would you ever trust someone so lazy, he won’t even do his own job?
trying to find you, can i have your facebook or myspace?
38th! xo all
Touching on the idea of streamlining Yahoo’s various services, not only would you want to drop some of them, you would want to better integrate the ones you keep in addition to marketing it more as a solid whole. Facebook does this particularly well. You don’t have “Facebook Photos” and “Facebook Wall” and “Facebook Pages”. You just have Facebook and all of the other capabilities are baked in.
As a different example, Google doesn’t have a single unified front end, but the services are better integrated and the flow from one service to another is made simpler than it appears to be with Yahoo.
So not only does Yahoo need to trim the fat, they need to make a better effort at tying together what remains.
I don’t think Yahoo should work hard at emulating Google. Like Microsoft, Google is one hugely successful idea surrounded by legions of fail. Both companies are chock full of guys with 160+ IQs, but these same smart fellows lack business sense and most couldn’t run a lemonade stand at a profit. Look at Android, it’s a good idea but the implementation and lack of planning have turned it into little more than a lawsuit magnet that will plague GOOG shareholders for years.
If Yahoo shut down tomorrow, would anyone really care?
Sure miss the podcasts!
I’ve been saving the podcasts for years in a folder called “NTV”.
[…] was an innovative company. What went wrong? Cringely argues that it was largely a problem of corporate culture. He writes Yahoo has a bureaucracy problem that […]
I always thought the idea was to see what the marketplace wants (or will want) in your area of expertise as a company, and then provide it to your customers at a profit. Is this so difficult to accomplish?.
There are rumors in the news this week (9/12-16) that an investment group is interested in buying Yahoo. If this were to happen, they will view and manage Yahoo as a pure business investment. Unnecessary, unprofitable stuff will be dumped. Costs will be cut. They will run the business to maximize profit and to make a return on their investment (the purchase of Yahoo).
Innovations must prove their value to bean counters before they will be allowed to proceed. If you think Yahoo restrictive management structure is bad now, running them strictly from an accounting perspective will be worse.
I fear for the Yahoo company, employees, and the services they offer. Jerry, Carol, and especially the Yahoo board have done a terrible job managing the company.
Silver Lake
https://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-09-16/silver-lake-said-to-weigh-buying-yahoo-selling-asian-assets.html
[…] Of course, the story line of “riches to rags” is an old one, but the speed in which Yahoo went up and down appears to reflect the accelerated pace of change that internet related business produces. In its glory days, Yahoo “got it”. But whatever it “got” changed quickly. Now it looks more like Yahoo doesn’t get it. […]
It has become much discussed recently that Google persists in trying to ensure that your search results are tailored to your supposed values/wishes/expectations. This alarms me, I want to do the choosing and not have Google do it.
So, have Yahoo do search on an unbiased basis and publicise that fact, not everyone would like it, but there would be a clear differentiation in search and for many people that would represent an improvement.
“…have Yahoo do search on an unbiased basis and publicise that fact…”
Not bad. I’d like the option to have a plain blank home page with a search bar and nothing else too.
I can hear ad Execs groaning all the way to Madison Avenue. At least you’d get more people using the site (at least two more anyway).
Breitere Nachfrage von Kunden und auch eine wesentliche Verbesserung im Rahmen, mbt sapatu weißen frauen schuhe , sollte die Liquidität zu helfen Stein Preiskategorien für die Dauer Gebäude dieser Art von Geld Blickfang, obwohl Horizont ist nicht in der Sonne in der Nähe der Name, behaupteten einige Branchenbeobachter. Des Kilalea, Analyst bei RBC Investitionsbereiche erwähnte Ihren Hund zu sein schien in der Regel wohl in Bezug auf die Tendenz steigend für Diamanten Gebühren auf lange Sicht bestimmt. “In einer normalen Branche, würde ich persönlich auf erstklassige Voraussetzung count (für DAA Fund), doch innerhalb der letzten riskanten natürlichen Umwelt, Vorhersagen sind in der Regel schwierig”, erklärte er. Peter Laib, vorbei Gehirn mit Private-Equity-Finance-Unternehmen, Adveq und nach dieser Vorsitzenden über DAA verbunden, erklärte Edelstein, billig mbt schuhe , erschien Quelle für unwahrscheinlich wachsen auf dem Weg Jahre da Null frische Beute aus war und auch im Falle gefunden das, was durchsickerte, könnte es haben, im Alter, um sie auszubeuten.
“says:” I got that word!
Are the podcasts no longer going to be posted?
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Wonderful information, valuable and excellent design, as share good stuff with good ideas and concepts, lots of great information and inspiration, both of which I need, thanks for all the enthusiasm to offer such helpful information here.
This alarms me, I want to do the choosing and not have Google do it.
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[…]I, Cringely » Blog Archive » What’s a Yahoo to Do? – Cringely on technology[…]…
Yahoo has a search page, search.yahoo.com, that is *less* cluttered than Google’s (now with +). Yahoo’s home page is a different site, a portal.
The main face of the cards is young and trendy women. As long as you like the bag, as long as you worship trends.
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