At Yahoo, a need to hit refresh

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In its rivalry with Google, Yahoo also has struggled with identity: it's fluctuated from being a search player to being a media property focused on selling brand and graphical ads.

During the Semel years, Yahoo crafted an image as a media company by establishing new headquarters in Santa Monica, Calif., hiring Braun, and attempting to develop original programming. The results were, by most accounts, disappointing. And while Yahoo is still investing in original content (it just launched a new business TV show much like one it used to operate before the dot-com bust), Yang and other executives are taking the company in a different direction.

One former executive put it like this: "Yahoo's been weighed down by trying to do too many things and not being very good at any of them, (and) not having the commitment to excel at any of them."

Yahoo's future may be in its past, and Yang said as much at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month. Straight out of the '90s Internet playbook, Yang wants Yahoo to be the starting point for online users, with greater emphasis on mail, search, and personal home pages. The company also plans to deliver technologies including Yahoo's Go 3.0 mobile products and a new e-mail platform. Last October, Yang also said the company would focus on extending its advertising offerings beyond Yahoo to sites across the Web and open up Yahoo's technology infrastructure to third-party developers and publishers.

To trim down, Yahoo also indicated in recent months that the company would phase out or consolidate services like photos, premium music, and auctions.

Miles said there's another problem inside companies like Yahoo. Ideas for new products, if they're not in the strategic plan of product launches, are often stifled because they're competing against those in the product hopper.

In fairness, companies like Yahoo can suffer from their own success. Often, a new product that competes with or doesn't directly benefit what made that company a success can be ignored, or worse, killed off. As a result, the employees who had those new ideas leave. Yahoo has had a flood of executives depart in recent years to head up companies like online video site GoFish. In another example, Yahoo's former director of product marketing, Richard Frankel, just joined SocialMedia Networks, an ad network for Facebook, as its chief operating officer.

"Silicon Valley is awash with people who have left their company because no one would listen to them," said Berkeley's Miles. Because ideas flow upward from the company, Miles said, changing top management isn't always enough to recharge a business.

"If you're going to keep an organization young," he said, "you must continue to work on getting everyone on the same page with knowledge flowing up and down and across."

[cparente]

Good Article

Thanks Stefanie. Nice to read an article on he importance of culture in an organization. It's often the most underestimated factor inhibiting corporate performance.

[btljooz]

Agreed, n/t ...belongs HERE! :8}

:8} Sorry

[btljooz]

Like ALL Large Coporations

that get too big too fast, mo$tly for the wrong reasons, Yahoo needs to remember the K.I.S.S. method.

What mostly helped Yahoo grow into what it is now is Simplicity.

Hey, Yahoo! As a user of many years, I give this advice: [b]K[/b]eep [b]I[/b]t [b]S[/b]hort & Sweet!!!

Knock off all the complication, go back and look at your roots, LEARN from your early Simplicity. ;)

[michaelo1966]

Hire Koogle back

Hindsight is 20/20; it's clear that TK was responsible for the Yahoo magic. Yang and Filo may have founded the company, but Koogle came around early and his mark was (obviously) substantive. If he'll take the job the Board should hire back TK. Firing people -- unless they're in the executive suite that caused this mess -- seems like exactly the wrong thing to do. All they'll do is drive up the street, take jobs at Google, and implement all the things they would've had they been allowed to at Yahoo, one or two which will make Google gobs of money and allow it to pound Yahoo further into the ground.

[cybervigilante]

Yahoo's new direction

Millions of people now want to get on the web, to do videos, mashups, businesses, trades, look for jobs, make websites, blogs, this and that. And they don't have the patience to learn two dozen different interfaces or type the same stuff into two dozen different sites. Yahoo needs to become a do-it-all portal with a simple interface. You should even be able to connect your video camera to Yahoo, upload and edit the result, then put it in a templated site or blog or store or whatever, and auto-connect with friends and interested parties to notif or sell, using neural-net-like tags. But again, the tech must be hidden. The tags would be auto-generated by an artificial intelligence program, although techies could override. We also need more picture and video recognition, not just text. This is the next phase, and Yahoo could catch on to it, since they have such resources, although not quite organized and simplified.

[nmcphers]

Yahoo VERY UNSECURED

When you sign up for a yahoo account, it asks you what city you were born in, and your date of birth. ANYONE who knows that information can use it to hack your account and reset your password. Anyone. Even better, yahoo does not allow you to change that information once you enter it. So if someone finds a way to hack your account this way, there is NOTHING you can do to stop them. You can't go back and create a fake birth city or date. I believe this flaw is big enough to receive national attention. I've sent Yahoo several emails and reported it to their security division, and they have done NOTHING.

[bridge solution]

YHOO used to crash

when it had 80000 simultaneous users...anybody remember that "ap"? that told you how many people were using yahoo at the same time?
for a long time its operating profits came from bank interest on its war chest. now, it's a dinosaur.
the brand itself is aging, and lacks any means to refresh, without purging some of its dust, like yahoo personals, which is a serious money maker for it, but just another reason to use MySpace's less meat-rack formulas for opening a dating circle; find real ways build community that has site -stickiness (a 90s term) and get organisedly back into the vision of what a portal is.
the recent "web 2" makeover is jarring, and, by my tests, a ram hog.
overall, imho what yhoo reallly needs is to find out what people actuallly want, and then see if it can deliver it.

[jshale]

Remove the bloat

I use Yahoo mail since it comes with my DSL account at AT&T. To use their web mail when away from home, I login from a login screen that takes me to the crowded Yahoo home page. I then have to click on a mail link there. This directs me to a page with more news links, where I have to again click another mail link to actually get to my inbox. Maybe the other web mail services would run me through the same gauntlet to generate them more page views, but it's a waste of my time. Fortunately I can use a mail client at home to read Yahoo mail for free as part of AT&T's package, otherwise I would be looking for another mail service.

[iBuzz]

You can go to Yahoo email directly

Why are you logging in through the home page to check email?

You can access Yahoo email by going to http://mail.yahoo.com
directly.

[iBuzz]

Finance and Sports rock - don't touch those!

I guess everyone wants Yahoo to be Google. Whatever. I love
finance.yahoo.com and sports.yahoo.com just the way they are. I
use those everyday. Except for occasionally checking
news.yahoo.com, I don't usually use much more from them. But
those are great sites -- the best in their class in my opinion. I
hope their cuts don't affect anybody in those divisions.

[johnxtampa]

Their advertising shows their desparation

They use questionable animated advertising from time to time, things that animate across the page you're reading.... Things that make you run your spyware detectors, because you can't beleive a company of Yahoo's (former) prominence would do them... But no, it's not Spyware... It's Yahoo running Desparationware

[aaydogan]

Yahoo<---Obsolete, A brand still without a product

Maybe some Chinese company will come along and buy the name
and start selling stereos and steam irons or something with the
Yahoo brand. Yang and company need to just pull the plug and go
away. Yahoo just doesn't have anything unique to offer. After
being horribly mismanaged by the incompetent Terry "I make the
most money for doing nothing" Semel, Yahoo needs to die a quick
death and go away!

[RompStar_420]

Yahoo Can Change

I have been using Yahoo messenger for a long time, I think now atleast 5 years, and I like it enough never to have to move to use anything else.

Sure there is the MSN messenger, but so what, I like Yahoo better and got used to it.

YAhoo can still come around, nothing is too late, if they stop counting beans and start to concentrate on inovation (what got them started), stop hiring managers, lawyers and function bean counters and start hiring young fresh mind with ideas, pay them the Big bucks, cuz no laywer or business manager can come up with anything other than a report comparing this quarter to the prior.

There is only two types of people in this world: Leaders and Followers. Yahoo used to be a leader, now it's just catching up and following.

Get rid of all the fat pork that made you to follow, and start leading again, or you will be R.I.P. and I will have to switch messenger clients.

[JCPayne]

Yahoo merge with EBAY!!!!

A merger with Ebay (first proposed back in 1999) could save Yahoo. Ebay gets millions of page hits daily that Yahoo could translate into more joint website visits. (e.g. imagine seeing a small box showing Ebay auctions closing soon on Yahoo.) It would make up for the marked failure of Yahoo Auctions. And would bolster Yahoo's marketplace against Google's Checkout Service...

Also Yahoo-Ebay-Skype-Paypal-Craigslist would be better under the same roof, and it would be a force to recon- with...

It would happen if Yahoo and Ebay would announce a merger.... I think that would be a better company.... It would certainly add some "umpph" for Yahoo's failed Yahoo Auctions and slightly lack luster performance of "Yahoo MarketPlace".... A Paypal/Yahoo Market Place could soooooo totally compete against Google's upstart "Google Checkout" online store service....

[galacticgufus]

maybe they could move

maybe yahoo would run better in china. didn't they help the communist gov't there hunt down some dissidents or something one time? they should all be on good terms.

[all106]

I just found a flaw in the yahoo mail system where I can see other peoples inbox. I can't read their mail, but I do appear to be able to delete it. I have an account in yahoo mail classic with over 70,000 unread emails in it, and when I sort by date, the view changes and I am looking at what is obviously someone else's email. I can refresh to see a new account.

[avpg]

In regard to your Yahoo writing,let my tell you ,that for about a week,I can not acces my inbox at Yahoo
I`been using for years,Idid everything that I was supouse to be able to regain the acces with no luck.
Is there a way to communicate directly to a costumer helper,by phone?. I d`nnt want to lose the addresses of so many friends.
Tia:[e-mail]