Yahoo's Bartz: We 'somehow got boring'
Yahoo continues to pull out all the stops in hopes of convincing investors and advertisers that even though it's a massive media and technology company today, it has a plan for the future.
"Today is the beginning of a journey back to respect," said Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz in a meeting with financial analysts at Yahoo's headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif. "Yahoo was the big shining star in the mid-1990s and mid-2000s, and then somehow we weren't so shiny anymore."
The all-day meeting, which is being Webcast, is designed to reconnect Yahoo with the financial community, something Bartz hinted earlier this year was long overdue in comments she made in New York. Ever since former Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang turned down a $33 per share offer from Microsoft in 2008, Yahoo's stock has languished at about half that value, and with the economy taking a turn for the worse, even a tepid recovery has been seen as welcome news.
Bartz brought a team of Yahoo leaders up on stage to show off what they've been doing to take better advantage of Yahoo's enormous reach across the Internet. For example, Tapan Bhat, senior vice president for integrated consumer experience, talked about how Yahoo's redesigned home page has increased the amount of time spent on that page by 20 percent, and click-through has likewise improved on both ads and content on that page.
Bryan Lamkin, senior vice president for applications, pledged to improve spam filters and duplicate the Yahoo Mail experience on mobile phones. And Jimmy Pitaro, vice president of media, ran through all of the plans his group has to increase the number of people who come to Yahoo for news and entertainment.
Clearly, Yahoo already operates on a grand scale. "We are a broad-based Internet technology company that serves up the most interesting content on the Internet to 600 million people," Bartz said.
But advertisers "are looking for a safe neighborhood," Bartz said. She meant that in order to get high-quality advertisers to spend lots of money with Yahoo, they have to give them high-quality content that they can feel confident about putting their message beside. Perhaps Bartz could throw that lesson in for free as part of the search deal with Microsoft.
Throughout the revival story Yahoo has tried so hard to push this year, there's a sense that the company is a little defensive about being seen as a place where innovation no longer happens. Bartz admitted that "we had kind of lost your respect" over the past few years. "We are a 14-year-old Internet company that somehow got boring."
Analyst days are not exactly the most exciting events produced by public companies. But it's all part of Yahoo's attempt to re-insert itself in the conversation about the future of the Internet, and investors will need to be on board for the company to make any real progress: not to mention that employee retention could get easier if the stock starts to climb.
Corrected 3:35 p.m. PDT with the correct spelling of Bryan Lamkin's name.
Tom Krazit writes about the ever-expanding world of Internet search, including Google, Yahoo, online advertising, and portals, as well as the evolution of mobile computing. He has written about traditional PC companies, chip manufacturers, and mobile computers, spending the last three years covering Apple. E-mail Tom. 
Yahoo! let Maps fester until Google Maps stole the spotlight. They let Photos fester as well until upstart Flickr became the hot new site and they eventually acquired Flickr and canned their own tech. They should have added blogging to GeoCities -- too late for that.
They still have some great content sites. I use Sports, Finance, and TV on a daily basis as well as News and Movies on a semi-regular basis.
Don't stop innovating, Yahoo. You're in Silicon Valley, that's what you're supposed to be doing. Everyone else around you is and if you don't you'll fall behind. Don't ever forget that.
Someone at yahoo is getting it right..
you got it right Bratz. That's exactly what it is. Yahoo got boring in between somewhere.
I think biggest mistake was when Yahoo first time started using Google like few years ago. That kinda pushed Google on forefront.
Better late then Never.
Hoping that once beloved Yahoo will be a resurgent again.
Other than that, I don't use all they offer, but I do make it a regular place to visit daily.
When I search, I use Google. I rarely search anywhere else. Social networking? Facebook... tech news: cNet. TechCrunch, Mashable, etc. Primary news aggregator: DrudgeReport. These are all things that Yahoo could be doing better.
Things that annoy me at Yahoo: top news stories headlines are misleading. Videos start with commercials and often fail to deliver the content (I use a Mac).
The brain drain from Yahoo! must be incredible. The problem is compounded by the fact that the best and the brightest are the *first* to leave since they have the foresight to see that things are going down the tubes, they have the best opportunities to take their talents elsewhere, and they are the gutsiest ones (who joined the company that they are abandoning at an early stage).
The question is whether or not Yahoo! can continue to attract, nurture and retain the most innovative contributors because buying up little startups won't prevent those people from leaving.
Google on the other hand were bold and they knew the true value of the Web and did anything to make the Web better, even if it meant competing with big companies to do it. Google took a lot of the dreams and vision that Netscape were touting in the 90s and executed it with near perfection. Remember the quote "The browser is the operating system". That was a Netscape vision 15 or so years ago.
The future belongs to the bold and those who are willing to take risks. Otherwise perfect safety is boring and you only ever achieve average results. Yahoo took the safe road and as a result they became a little boring.
two tastes that still confuse the valley.
Actually, I take that back. For about a year I was heavily involved in answers.yahoo.com I raised my "rank" (or whatever) to "top contriubitor" in the real estate section. Then I went to log in (as I did many times a day) and it said my account was suspended. I don't know if I gave an answer that some admin didn't like or what. All I know is I e-mailed a few times to try to get it reinstated and got nothing back.
So I left.
I have to assume similar things happened to similar people on similar services of theirs. Once people that contribute (and MAKE THE CONTENT you need) start to leave, it's hard to get them back.
However that type of stuff is totally missed by the big guys on top. The have rot from the bottom and are too high to see it.
And why are there still two Yahoo chess venues- the "new" Yahoo chess, which by the way has been around for at least the past eight years, and the old chess, which by the way is better?
- by bpob1977 October 29, 2009 12:18 PM PDT
- They're about to loose a large number of current users if they proceed with their plans to force us to use the new homepage...I've yet to find anyone who actually likes it. Much like their "new and improved" mail service, it's absolutely awful!
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