en-us http://www.keithwatanabe.net/index.php Keith Watanabe's Website http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2007/8/3/b7722ec0043a3046d20086f35f863842.html
With regards to social networking, I think Yahoo is wasting time and money investing in this area. The area is too competitive and overfilled with sites that add little value between each other, except in terms of minor differences or a specialty focus. But the numbers provided on the article from TechCrunch are hard to rationalize and force a major company like Yahoo to really put this kind of effort into a social networking company.

Naturally, Yahoo needs to re-think what their identity truly is. Before they "were the internet." However, now, they are an amorphous mass with little add value per service except for major acquisitions which may share their user base and infrastructure. Perhaps, this is where Yahoo may serve a real purpose: infrastructure. If they are the internet, their business plan might be in large scale infrastructure support.

And what I mean by infrastructure support should not just be hardware and networks, but the APIs, redundancy, experience and capital to allow start ups to stay competitive. Like a company that provides the tools to build companies. They have their developers network, which is a nice start. But they need to provide more. Here is a suggestion to Yahoo to refocus their business strategy in terms of specific services they can provide to improve their image:

- Allow the use of an Open ID type of scenario. Yahoo has a plethora of registered users. Making the Yahoo email address as the central point for smaller companies to manage their infrastructure would reduce the need for companies to develop authentication systems. Add value services on top of this would be options to increase security (SSL certificates, image verification, authorization schemas)
- An improved ad supported system that is flexible. Be less restrictive and improve the model. The bidding method was a great way to make money. But the quality of ads and the ability for people to control the types of ads on their websites require improvement.
- Provide the hardware, network redundancy, clustering and diverse hosting options. For instance, allow one to use Apache, PHP, mod_perl, Ruby on Rails, Tomcat, JBoss, IIS that is pre-setup and multiple permutations depending on the need of the company.
- Increase the number web services to allow companies to create new mashups. Maps, weather, stock quotes, news items, etc. are great starts. However, these must be increased and diversified to provide developers greater flexibility and companies to emerge and generate creative businesses to propel the internet into web 3.0.
- Begin contributing to major open source APIs to improve stability in development. Apache, PHP, mod_perl, etc. should be key investments that Yahoo enters rather than attempting to continuously build competing development tools. The reduction of languages and APIs and the improvement in the stability and functionality within these APIs using Yahoo's monstrous infrastructure as the testing ground should be a key focus for the company.
- Provide legal consulting services for start up companies. Perhaps a true service would be to create an automated legal consulting service that takes out the middle man and provides questionaires (a la TurboTax) to provide companies ways to generate their own businesses without being forced into hiring their own lawyer.
- Provide automated venture capital to allow people to quickly get their ideas up and running without the hassle of the normally bureaucratic and competitive area of going to VCs or banks in getting money. For example, start a program where a person wants to generate a new service and gets anywhere between $50-$1000 per month automatically after going through an online questionaire that determines in the end how much a person can receive. Other internal services like advertisement, shopping carts, etc. would be provided as part of the services to help redirect some of the money back into Yahoo in a guaranteed way. Naturally, an idea like this is high risk, but Yahoo's coffers are deep and buying people left and right without a strategy is no different in some ways than what I'm proposing above (except to the anal retentive symantics freaks).

Part of what I'm suggesting above is just standardizing some of the areas that I see many companies rebuilding over and over. Yahoo probably has some of the best practices nailed down so providing these best practices as a form of business would be better than forcing each company to reinvent the wheel time and time again. Also, it'll lock down how things are down better and allow businesses to truly focus on the core problem of making money through the internet.

If you go over the timeline for Yahoo, you can see a pattern emerging:

- Yahoo 1.0 - directory service
- Yahoo 1.5 - massive portal
- Yahoo 2.0 - massive copy cat, with no sense of identity
- Yahoo 3.0 - confused and directionless

Forget the economics of keeping this line of business or getting rid of these other lines of business. A company should have a real vision and sense of culture. Without this, no one can really go up to that company and understand what that company does. Yahoo's identity is so twisted because they attempt to do too much for everyone. But their purpose is twisted as well: do everything because they think they can do it better? Do everything because it really helps society? Do everything because they just want to increase their money?

I can't fathom how Yahoo can increase their traffic anymore than they realistically have. This is something Yahoo doesn't really need to improve their business model. Instead, Yahoo needs to utilize what they have and provide it to people. The main assets of Yahoo are their experience, infrastructure, reach, traffic, and variety of services collected into numerous lines of business.

Yahoo 3.0 should not be confused and directionless. Yahoo 3.0 as I present it needs to be the Internet platform. It has to go back to Yahoo 1.0 where the focus was on providing services to allow other people to show up since no service was around at the time to collect this information. And it'll come full circle by being not just a directory of services, but a pure information service provider, linking in the nodes of experience to the next generation of developers and businesses.

This ought to be Yahoo 3.0.

Forget social networking. It's just a phase of the internet.

The bigger picture has always been information and services.]]> Fri, 03 Aug 2007 22:29:55 -0600 http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2007/8/3/b7722ec0043a3046d20086f35f863842.html http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2008/2/9/584ba03f8a7bac00f6b4b7475a9214b4.html
This article relates to an article I read about IAC and how Barry Diller wants to split IAC into more companies. His justification for the split was that each company would provide more value for their investors while being free to make their own decisions. I mean, if you look at the internet properties from IAC in the past, you'd see a number of non-related items like travel with friend invitations or match making or even ticket sales. Obviously, Diller's intent there was to become a major player in the internet by taking over some hot internet properties. But these properties all had distinct brands like CitySearch, Ticketmaster, Ask, Expedia, etc. Having them under one unified, cohesive umbrella was a challenge that Diller wasn't able to meet.

In this case, giving each company a sense of independence honestly to me properly won't make much of an effect in the end. In my employment with Ticketmaster, we had business partners within the company like CitySearch and Evite, but we didn't do much with them. There was a challenge for the employees to come up with an idea of how to link them. So people said something like an event, movie and dinner. Well, great but it's almost like people were having difficulties writing their senior thesis for a university. And for the most part, I think Ticketmaster was fairly independent and agile enough. I did not see much bureaucratic issues. So perhaps at the board level, things were different.

Compare that to some financial companies like CitiGroup or HLIKK where bureaucracy runs rampant. Zero agility exist in those companies. There's a big joke about CitiGroup's international homepage. Did you know that from an organic search point of view, CitiGroup's webpage is one of the lowest in the Hong Kong market? Yet when it comes to paid searches, CitiGroup's is one of the highest. The reason is that all approvals for anything done in CitiGroup must go through the NYC office. So it's completely fine for them to spend tons of money when they could be doing cost if each individual sector could manage their own company independently.

With HLIKK, the common complaint I'd receive would be the lack of direction and vision within some of the departments (IT, etc.). You'd have this constant tug-of-war especially in IT where the international architects would hold some domain of control and the local groups were in some way forced to follow these standards. Yet there was honestly nothing enforcing these rules. Worse yet, the projects suffered from extreme degrees of micro management and unending project management hell. It wouldn't be uncommon to see a project die out before it'd get completed because of bloated cost, times, and resource allocation failures.

But if you look at Google, it remains one of the more (apparently) agile companies around. I think the 20% rule helps a lot and the fact that everyone in the world has access to the code as well as being able to fix it when they need it. With the various range of success stories coming from Google Labs, these elements of company culture are good examples to demonstrate to other companies in being able to expand at rapid rates.

So let's take a look at the areas where large companies can improve upon to allow agility within their organization:

• Flexibility for employees to work on their own projects.
• Allowing brands, departments, geographical regions or companies acquired to operate independently.
• Avoiding micromanagement.
• Removal of bureaucratic project management (e.g. the waterfall methodology for software engineering).
• Eliminating the notion of "cost centers". (You are one business)
• Eliminating the notion that some areas of the business make more money than others, thereby creating interdepartmental competition (which occurs heavily within finance companies)
• Eliminating the notion of the timesheet (most companies use timesheets, in my experience, to budget the hours for projects, which then relate to the dollars per hour for a single employee. But these timesheets do not accurately reflect "incidental" time detractions like coffee breaks, casual conversation, meetings, etc. because in practice most employees don't record nor really give a shit about the "little numbers")
• Emphasizing project cost rather than strategy and the end goal of a project as a determinant of continuing a given project (imagine the look of horror to the team's faces when a project is eliminated after spending their weekends and late nights in the office)
• Eliminating enforced standards across a company. Instead, providing shared areas of expertise and knowledge bases like Wikis to help other groups train members and improve the local areas points of expertise.

This allows groups to tackle projects on a more independent basis. You still need the unified vision of what a company's purpose is to determine whether projects have relevance to a company. I mean, in most cases, companies don't want people aimlessly doing things for no good reason on company time. For instance, you don't want developers working on a physics projects if the company's main products involve selling annuities (unless these people are intending to figure out a way of aging young kids so that they'll be in the mindset of buying an annuity :p). But the main point is that you really want people within the company to take initiative to help improve what a company does. Having restraints from unreasonable costs restrictions, etc. prohibit companies from reacting to the market in time.]]> Sat, 09 Feb 2008 19:37:23 -0700 http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2008/2/9/584ba03f8a7bac00f6b4b7475a9214b4.html http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2008/5/6/be1c6b098c5252a189a6ef75a6f39d59.html
Not all companies do this, but I find companies who entrust their employees with their desktop make a heavy statement about their working environment.]]> Tue, 06 May 2008 18:00:36 -0600 http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2008/5/6/be1c6b098c5252a189a6ef75a6f39d59.html