Bartz lights fire under Yahoo engineers
Yahoo's 5 percent layoff is going to be different this time.
So new Chief Executive Carol Bartz promised Tuesday as she announced first-quarter financial results and described the impression she's now begun trying to make on the Internet pioneer. Instead of an across-the-board cut, Yahoo's layoff of about 675 people is intended to enable new hiring and investments in the company's bigger Internet properties.
Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz
(Credit: Yahoo)"We have good engineers but have to hire more and get them focused on the right stuff. It's probably the most important thing Yahoo's going to do to really become a big strong growing international company," Bartz said during a conference call to discuss the company's lackluster first-quarter results.
Specifically, she said the company will hire engineers to bring Yahoo's major properties onto a unified global platform rather than its current variety of different systems for different countries. Today's scattered technology infrastructure has prevented Yahoo from adapting quickly and adding new features, especially outside the United States, she said.
The choice shows Bartz isn't taking a quick-fix approach to Yahoo's problems. First comes engineering, then comes a better experience for Yahoo users, and only then comes the financial return. "All that investment will pay off, I believe, with more innovation, faster and better user engagement, and the stuff we need to be a hot site. If we're a hot site, the advertisers will follow," she said.
And Bartz cautioned that the revamp isn't going to be complete soon.
"To fully globalize all our platform is probably a couple-year program," Bartz said. "You can't underestimate the past focus the company had on the U.S. market...The international properties almost had to fend for themselves."
As an example, Bartz pointed to a revamped Yahoo Music site that opens up to content from YouTube, iTunes, Amazon, and other sites and lets Yahoo members share their music-related activity with their friends. That revamp wasn't possible internationally, she said.
Venting frustration
During the call, Bartz generally stuck to her script, reining her characteristically salty language. But some of her frustration with Yahoo's sluggish pace shone through at the end of the hour-long call.
Yahoo's engineering focus "was sort of scattered to the winds. There were engineers in almost every country, and way too many product people. We had one product management person for every three engineers," Bartz said. "We had a lot of people running around but nobody fucking doing anything!"
Projects like the Yahoo Open Strategy have been more than a year in the making and only are arriving gradually. Yahoo is a big property, and changes necessarily come slowly as the company tries to figure out what works and doesn't as it tows its massive user base toward new technology, but meanwhile, rival Google touts its experimental "launch early, launch often" philosophy.
Even as Google expands into telephone services, Web browsers, mobile phone operating systems, general-purpose cloud computing infrastructure, and any number of other projects, Bartz is keeping Yahoo focused on its core assets: a number of high-traffic Web properties.
Bartz specifically pointed to Yahoo's home page, sports, news, finances, mail, search, mobile, and entertainment sites as the companies focus, saying the company will deliver a "wow experience for our users."
Patience, patience
Patience could be hard to come by. Yahoo's first-quarter revenue, excluding commissions paid to partners, declined 14 percent from $1.352 billion to $1.156 billion.
Yahoo's revenue is under pressure.
(Credit: Yahoo)The company was hurt by a variety of factors. Revenue from graphical "display" ads on Yahoo sites dropped 13 percent worldwide to $371 million, while revenue from search advertising dropped 3 percent to $399 million. Affiliate marketing revenue, a search-related category, declined 16 percent to $511 million.
Revenue per search dropped along with the economy. "It's like online window shopping. People are grazing around, they're just not clicking through to buy," Bartz said.
But online search remains key to Yahoo's future, Bartz said, though she declined to say whether it's necessary for the company to be a primary player or whether it would work if it's using another company's search results. Microsoft and Yahoo held many discussions in 2008 about such a partnership, with Microsoft taking over the business one option, and such talks appear to be on again according to All Things D and the Wall Street Journal.
"I'm well versed enough in the search business at yahoo to say it's absolutely critical to Yahoo. It's critical to our customers and partners that they have a combined search and display experience on the Internet. I haven't changed my position on that. Relative to anything else with Microsoft, I'm not going to comment," she said.
Bartz also specifically touted one hybrid project, Yahoo's plan to bring branded display ads to search results, which today feature only text ads.
In the long run, though, Bartz remains a believer in traditional display ads.
"Pulling back on brand advertising is a short-term solution that leads to long-term brand erosion," she said, and those with premium brands won't resort to just bidding for search keywords to preserve their brand.
Stephen Shankland writes about a wide range of technology and products, but has a particular focus on browsers and digital photography. He joined CNET News in 1998 and since then also has covered Google, Yahoo, servers, supercomputing, Linux and open-source software, and science. E-mail Stephen, or follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/stshank. 
Yahoo USED to be a very useful site. Then they loaded their pages up with animations, JavaScript, and other bloatware. All those handy functions she touts, search, mapping, finance, television listings, have all steadily become slower, more crash-prone, more browser-picky, and less useful as the years have rolled by. I hardly ever use Yahoo or any of their services anymore because of this.
Wake up, lady. Make your services, lean and useful again, and THEN the users will come back.
Search? HA HA HA. Google's search engine is always about 2 weeks more up to date than Yahoo's. And if that (*&*#)(*@# search "assistant" is a blight upon the human race. Let me turn it off and actually have it STAY OFF.... PLEASE.
Over time the Yahoo sites have become less and less user friendly.
Last year's badly handled changes to Yahoo profiles was little short of a debacle. And it is still not possible to see if a person is online from their profile despite Yahoo acknowledging that this was a major failure of their profile redesign and the 360 project was just junked despite many users having spent considerable time creating profiles.
Flickr has undergone constant changes since Yahoo bought the site and given the size of blogs on the site complaining about the changes and as a regular user I can testify that most of the changes have reduced the quality of the user experience!
What was once a simple clean and easy to understand site is now a cluttered glitchy mess.
If Ms Bartz wants to sort Yahoo's problems out she can start by listening to her users instead of trying to copy the latest 'net fad or trying to turn Yahoo into Facebook.
A return to basics is what is needed!
And just when is Yahoo going to fix Yahoo messenger for Mac?
Yahoo!360 was a great idea when they first launched it. But they insisted on being Y!-only instead of Y!-centric (not allowing me to link to my blog on another site, not letting me link other IM/email addresses, not letting me list other websites).
I gladly paid $35/year for LAUNCHcast until they killed it a few months ago. I gladly pay $25/year for Flickr. I'm active in Yahoo!Groups. All of Yahoo!'s best properties, IMHO, were ones they purchased, with the exception of IM. And even there, the software is so bloated that it's unbearable and I end up using Digsby instead.
Yeah, yeah, great story, grandpa.
Someone said they are copying Microsoft and that's dead on. Not just design, but also in bloat across everything.
taken up to 8$ then to 10$. Then they pulled a fast one. In December I received a notice
that Yahoo had changed their rate to 34.95 and they appended an email, supposedly
a notice sent to me in July, informing me of this rate hike. Well, I had no alternative
and they went ahead renewed my domain, based on my credit card info.
I don't use their email much, and I don't know, nor care to know more about
their other services.
If, there are many such examples from around the world, you can be sure
YAHOO is in deep muck!
Getting back to tech is a great approach.
Yang was too paralyzed to pull the trigger, and Semel was too much about media and what to buy.
While the road to being a viable player again might be a while away, this is a baby step in the right direction.
Bartz clearly is a take no sh&t CEO, and is precisely what YHOO needs!
In fact we used to have a saying that Yahoo was divided into two seperate companies (dotcom and notcom). Structurally Yahoo was setup completely wrong, major platform developments where produced by the engineering team that was attached to the US domestic product team, so if a US requirement would often result in international requirements being delayed or shelved, international development was largely only done if budget could be found inside the US teams budget, which rarely happened. Yahoo needs to restructure the US operation so that the US product teams is just another country team on par with all others, which contributed budget back to a central not contry orientated development team which had a remit to create internationalisable products from the ground up.
The current mechanism often resulted in 1.0 products being built with no i18n or l10n capabilities at all, the assumption being that they could be "retro-fitted" in version 1.1 or 1.2 etc. Hence international effectively ending up having to "fork" products and maintain parallel development mechanisms. The initial products where often "lobbed over the wall" at the international groups with no support or documentation.
It sounds to me as an ex-insider that Bartz has hit the nail on the head, yahoo's growth in the US will be limited, most of its growth will be in non-US countries where there is fantastic potential, but almost no support from the mothership. This one key issue was recognised by virtualy all international staff as being the major blockage to being able to compete with other services, but it was largly ignored bu the US leadership at the time who where only interested in US domestic business and saw international as unwanted cost.
- by detsugu April 22, 2009 3:14 PM PDT
- I hope she can really globalize Y! products this time, not centralized but localizable on a single platform.
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