The revolving door executive soap opera at Yahoo continues with their latest CEO already out for essentially fabricating his CS degree. Why no one at Yahoo (nor ebay/PayPal for that matter) didn’t do thorough due diligence is a mystery. Still, what’s left at Yahoo is quite sad as the one mighty tighten is nothing more than a brazen prostitute where top level names in the industry get in for a quick buck but leave the company in no better shape than the way America’s presidents in the past few decades have done.
Of course, part of the problem is that the company is too shareholder driven but with too many external forces attempting to drive the company. The company’s existence is exclusively to appease them rather than re-establish a sense of identity. As a result, the lack of focus has created a huge void in the potential of what Yahoo could still be while Google, Facebook and others speed merrily past the dimming horizons of a former giant.
For Yahoo to recover, it’s quite clear that the first step is to remove these external parties (i.e. shareholders) from attempting to control so many unfavorable decisions. Second, they need to pick someone who isn’t established. All the so-called established big names who stepped foot in the company did little to raise true value to the users (not shareholders), instead burgeoning their own pocketbooks with fat golden parachutes. If you examine the entire management and leadership team at Yahoo, you will notice how many “big wigs” infest the company at different levels. Yes, each of these people have impressive resumes just in terms of name dropping. But if you think about what they actually contribute, you have to realize that they’re nothing more than blood sucking leeches. That convinces me that just procuring another “big name, heavy hitter” won’t do the users of Yahoo any justice. They need someone hungry, at the bottom who understands what Yahoo can do and leverage the existence infrastructure, talent and data.
But that’s quite obvious. How can Yahoo move from a proverbial money whore as a company back towards a global leader? Just like mayor Bloomberg in NYC focused on a few key areas to improve the streets of NYC, Yahoo needs a similar strategy. My suggestion is to start on the following zones:
- Get rid of email, chat and group message spam. I switched my personal email from Yahoo to gmail because I’ve encountered a ridiculous amount of spam. Occasionally, email from friends would be counted as a spam while a piece of spam gets through. This has cost me personally on numerous occasions. Because email, chat and groups are huge with Yahoo as part of a long standing business, getting rid of spam would help improve user trust back with the company.
- Exposing media as software services without charging. Yahoo’s connection to various media allows them the privilege of having an enormous wealth of data. Unfortunately, a great deal of Yahoo’s web services are limited and virtually useless. Some are more focused than others. However, organizing information into something searchable is something that I don’t see as being unfeasible. For instance, given a movie, I want to find all related information to it (e.g. directors, actors/actresses, producers, release dates, movie connections). Similar with music, books, etc. I feel that this aspect of Yahoo is extremely underutilized and can provide the platform for many 3rd party developers to embrace and create better software that can scale without having to reinvent the wheel.
- Do not charge for search. Google already exceeds on this category. However, I feel that search as a software service needs to be free to extract more information for 3rd party developers. Most other search services that are free lack the quality of a Google. However, Yahoo/Bing might provide a good alternative on this end.
These are just a few suggestions, but I think they’re worthy for a company that has the scale of a Yahoo. Hopefully, they’ll take my suggestion.