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Yahoo SVP: We are some crappy peanut butter
I must admit, I have always liked Yahoo!. Even though they are the underdog today, and clearly nowhere as big as Google (based on market cap), I still like them. I think they could once again become a dominant player in the online space, but today I am not even sure if they are in the Top 10. I must admit that I hate peanut butter and hope that Yahoo can get moving again to be the innovative leader they were once before. If I had an opportunity to join Google, Microsoft or Yahoo, Yahoo would be my first choice. Because I think I could make the greatest impact there.
If you are a Yahoo! employee and would like to chat about the memo and the current environment at Yahoo!, send me a note, your name and position would not be disclosed unless you request it.
Today the Wall Street Journal got a hold of a memo from Brad Garlinghouse, a Yahoo senior vice president.
Basically Brad boils the problems down to:
- We lack a focused, cohesive vision for our company.
- We lack clarity of ownership and accountability.
- We lack decisiveness.
And his plan is to:
- Restore accountability and clarity of ownership.
- Execute a radical reorganization. We must reduce our headcount by 15-20%.
Brad also discusses several issues with purchases they have made competing with other Yahoo! properties. I think this is a big deal. Trying to keep things apart from the main Yahoo! only hurts the Yahoo! brand overall. While it is "cool" to keep Flickr separate from the main Yahoo! photos, the two should be combined.
I wonder if this will change things for the Bix and MyBlogLog acquisitions. In my chat with Mark, Bix CEO yesterday, he mentioned Bix would remain separate. I wonder if Brad's plan moves forward what will happen.
Brad notes:
We need to exit (sell?) non core businesses and eliminate duplicative projects and businesses.
So what goes? Flickr? Yahoo! Photos? Deli.cio.us? I don't think you need to eliminate them Brad. You need to merge the best of everything and create the new Yahoo!, one that can dominate and get people excited once again about what you are doing.
Be like Rocky in Rocky IV and beat down your opponent. You say its not a race, it is a marathon. You are now entering the 25th mile, now turn on the afterburners or the competition will leave you in their dust.
Yeah but the inability for Yahoo to successfully integrate new companies is really the problem you’re pointing to. There were some structural issues that made it difficult for Yahoo to offer a Google AdSense competitor, and the lack of decisive leadership meant that they sat around twiddlling their thumbs instead of fixing the problems. Look at other acquisions that Yahoo has made that have foundered… Oddpost’s product *still* isn’t properly integrated into Yahoo Mail…. Flickr and Yahoo Photos are confused and confusing… What are they doing with del.icio.us? The point is that Yahoo can’t execute, and that’s directly attributable to executives who are afraid to be bold.
The memo is weak. It’s too generic. Wouldn’t even exist had the acquisition of Overture gone more smoothly. Google’s executing better on search and contextual advertising than Yahoo. That’s the core reason why Google’s stock is outperforming Yahoo’s stock. Fix that first. Don’t fire employees while Google is hiring. Don’t give up on important acquisitions of products (and people) like Flickr and del.icio.us. The success of the recent Open Hack Day shows the capacity of the engineers to foster a positive environment from the bottom up. Did this SVP forget to file his TPS report on time?
Yeah, I never understood why “integrating” with the Yahoo!-account meant using their very unfriendly signup page. Flickr already made the mistake before and tried to force people to “merge” their Flickr account with their Yahoo! profile through a pretty complicated procedure.
And it’s good that they dropped that and that I am allowed to keep my Flickr account as-is, and have a Yahoo! account (which I don’t use much anyway).
With Yahoo! in general – imo – once you get past the signup, it’s incredibly convenient to have one account for groups, answers and so on. You really have to admit that. This whole “single-sign-on” thing really works.
And if they would re-work this part and only require you to input data like a gender and zip code where it’s appropriate and (really) needed, that would be a huge plus.
Don’t say layoffs! When you say layoffs it hurts morale big time. And it pisses me off when an SVP starts talking about cutting people from a company that makes a huge annual profit. Yes we need to refocus, yes we need to eliminate competing properties empower GMs etc. But we should move people around before we start losing them. Reorg, combine products, etc. But those things are lot of work and someone needs to do it.
There are people at yahoo who simply put don’t work real hard and they have become dead wood. This is not good for them, it is not good for the employees who are passionate and working hard, and finally it is not good for shareholders. In most cases these people are known within their groups and should be eliminated on monday morning so that they can find something that they are passionate about.
Yeah, totally agree. Integrating their shopping sprees is where Yahoo! needs to improve big time.
oh god, please please please Yahoo. Lay me off and let me get my severance. Better yet, if and when you do, please ask for volunteers…Just make it snappy, because I need to decide which of my outstanding offers I have in hand to take.
First off, things are so frickin disorganized in the Product Management, I’m surprised you’re able to get this far. Does anyone have the concept of a “Plan of Execution”, or are decisions made by just playing spin the bottle in a boardroom????
And what’s up with hiring more “managers” then there are workers? Does it take like 3 managers to manage 1 worker-bee? I guess everyone just likes telling others what to do but no one really likes to do real work.
And man, some of the Yahoo Techie workers in HQ (the ones that aren’t lazy and still do work) are like a blast from the past. A bunch of 90ies BSD hackers that rather hack away trying to optimize a few lines of BSD kernel code than do anything really useful for the business. Then techies from acquisitions are much brighter than these old farts.
BTW: Yahoo, you stink when it comes to software process, or product management process, or shall i say lack there of. It’s no surprise you can’t execute on sh*t. You lack any vision, you just react to what has already happened.
See you in a couple of years (months possibly) along with Netscape.
Don’t forget, Yahoo has some of the most well-done apps on the net. They really do a quality job on everything they touch. Better usability and design than google, imo.
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aXis denied
Go to flickr.com and try to signup.
- Get transferred from flickr.com over to Yahoo! Registration. (CONFUSING!)
- Get forced to enter things like [gender], [birth date], [postal code], etc. (WHY?)
- The “Check Availability of Yahoo! ID” launches a popup window! (WHY?)
- Submit form and get transferred to flickr where you’ve got to signup a “Screen Name” (FRUSTRATING!)
What should be a simple form with a 1-click process is now overly complicated and doesn’t take advantage of even the simplest AJAX functionality (ID lookup inline) that could dramatically improve user experience. All this, in an account signup form, from a “Technology Leader”? They’re not exactly making it easy!
Yes there is deadwood at Yahoo, but the layoffs need to start with the senior management who have been there too many years already. They are too caught up in their own comfortable lives to ever consider being daring and too timid to consider new things because they can’t be bothered to learn something new and different. You’ve never seen so many technologists who are so afraid of new ideas, new approaches, new technologies, and being truly innovative. Instead, if they don’t understand something, they denigrate it, mock it, and can’t be bothered to consider whether a different way makes sense. (looking at you Dave Nak) These are folks who came to where they are during Web 1.0 and either don’t understand or don’t care that things are changing, and as a result cannot grasp the new landscape. There’s a whole fleet of folks who’ve been there in the 3-5 year range, not to mention a whole boatload of uselss MBAs who couldn’t make a bold decision to save their lives, that need to be put out of the company’s misery. Rank and file engineers aren’t the problem, it’s the incompetent people in the middle of the food chain who need to be sent packing.
This is the exact same thing Semel did when he started. He made every business unit leader present a case for why they should stay and then got rid of a ton of “properties” that weren’t profitable or weren’t going to be. Semel seems to have lost his own vision.