Yahoo & Yang’s 100-Day Report Card

Om Malik, Friday, September 28, 2007 at 8:25 AM PT Comments (20)

There is supposed to be a big meeting today at Yahoo (YHOO) headquarters today, where the entire management will meet and discuss the company’s “grand plan.”

About 300-odd folks with titles that say vice president or something equally elevated will get into a room and listen to Jerry Yang (CEO and co-founder) talk about the future and how it will impact 14,000 Yahooligans. Kara Swisher predicts the meeting will be a snoozefest, and suggests turning it into “Survivor: The Sunnyvale Edition.”

Since June 18, when Yang took over as CEO, the company has spent around $700 million on new companies, shut down some minor projects, shaken up the sales staff, and gotten rid of Lloyd Braun and a bunch of other folks.

The actions thus far are muddled, and while there are high expectations from this meeting, I wouldn’t count on it. How do you rate Yahoo and Yang’s performance so far?

20 comments so far

John Mills said:

I think Yahoo needs a new face. Yang seems to be better than the last one, but not that great. Although Yahoo still leads Google in number of hits(according to Alexa) but in terms of market cap and brand(at least in the tech community), there’s just no comparison.

Don Jones said:

They’re making the venture capital guys happy with their company shopping…

blah said:

yahoo is reactive. the amount of change they demand will be proportional to the amount of pain the suffer in the markets. to date, this pain has not been intense enough. push the stock to its next support level - 18? and you will see the chainsaws come out. with the stock about 26 you will probably see minor changes

Om Malik said:

Amen to that John. I think they need to be shaken up really hard and slim down and become more focused. It can still be a great brand and a company it was supposed to be.

September 28th, 2007
10:31 AM PT
TDavid said:

If you base things off the stock price, that shows some promise. Yahoo is still a jack of too many trades, master of few. While that might have worked in the 90s when they rode to prominence, it just makes them look clumsy in 2007.

September 28th, 2007
11:15 AM PT
darrenstuart said:

I think Yahoo should become a publishing company for the web age. Buy a bunch of interesting sites and sell the advertising.

They should look at cnet and see how they do it. Maybe if there is enough in the bank they could try a takeover.

September 28th, 2007
11:42 AM PT
Jackson said:

I think they’ll get it turned around. They do need to shut down some properties. They also need to get some big distribution deals away from Google and/or MSN.

September 28th, 2007
11:43 AM PT
Chris Lynn said:

I think Yahoo is a great company, it’s unfortunate they can’t get their stuff together. Do the various divisions not communicate? With Yahoo’s strong user base and diverse portfolio of properties, they could be the ultimate social network. They just need to integrate all the features to create a more streamlined user experience, linking Yahoo Messenger, Mail, Flikr, News, etc. Hopefully, with Mash and the acquisition of Zimbra, they’ll finally get it right.

September 28th, 2007
11:53 AM PT
Jason Barnes said:

One of the problems Yahoo! faces is trying to evolve without alienating their average user. Lets face it, most of the Yahoo!’ers aren’t power users, and it’s difficult for them to manoever and innovate without losing their audience. The end result may be a somewhat scattered effort, but if you look at their properties, they’re still well positioned, and should see improved success in spite of their ‘master of none’ status…

September 28th, 2007
12:32 PM PT
Greg C. said:

I think it’s a mixed bag with Yahoo,they’re still strong as a portal site. My Yahoo, Finance, and Sports are all good sites, but they failed miserably with their TV site and HotJobs, and have stopped innovating with respect to Search, having bowed down to GOOG.

Yahoo! Search Results

For a company that is probably struggling to find any sort of good news, this type of a headline has to get them smiling:

Yahoo tops Google in quality of searches, study says
While Google dominates market share, Yahoo gets more users to click on resul…

Bob said:

Sorry, a lot of you guys do net get the point. Yahoo! is no 2nd Google! Yahoo! is mainly (even without Semel) a media company and Google is mainly a search engine. Each companies tab into the other ones business (Google: Google Finance, GMail, Google News with hosted articles, etc. vs Yahoo!: started building own search technology 3 years ago, aquisition of Overture/Blue Lithium/Right Media + Panama projekt to compete with Google Adsense, etc.)

Yahoo! is - still - the much greater brand, its more fun and already over 10 years old. yahoo has plenty of satisfied users and is still the no 2 most visited website worldwide.

what the need to do is just start being innovative again. not only aquisitions, building cool web applications inhouse and before any other company. this is what google is doing much more better. thats it.

watch google stock price going down next year. big growth rates are over. they can not gain more market share in search, they can only lose from now on.

John said:

Yahoo! definitely needs to focus, slim down on offerings and improve its mostly used existing products, such as Mail (Mail AJAX is so slow…)

Niraj J said:

I buy into the Goldman Story (upgrade yhoo) just this time. Markets are either ahead of the stock OR behind.

I think at this point of time. the market is ahead of GOOG and behind YHOO.

The pendulam shall move soon.

My basis-

Revenue comparision - Goog = 1.6 *(YAHOO)
Market Cap - Goog = 5 * (YHOO)
Earnings - Goog = 5.3 * (YHOO)

With GOOG at 90% plus market share in add. It can only lose share with live.com and others coming in.

You need to have atleast three players in the market

John Smith said:

Um Lloyd Braun has been gone for almost a year, not since June 18th.

Erik said:

How on earth did Yahoo! end up with 300 vice-presidents?

Ajay said:

As bad as Semel was, I think Yang has been worse. Although Semel drove Yahoo into the ground as a technology company, he at least had some business sense and built up their advertising as they consolidated all the traffic from the dot.com bust and became the sole remaining portal. But remember, it was Yang and co. that made all the dumb moves during the dot com boom that lead to Semel having to come in in the first place. Yahoo has no reason to exist as they clearly have no idea what they’re doing. The more dumb moves they make, the faster they go out of business and stop screwing around with the funny money they get from Wall Street. Maybe some company that actually knows what they’re doing can take their place then.

September 28th, 2007
10:21 PM PT
Noah Vail said:

This is like walking into a Flavor-aide fiesta.

Is anyone here aware of the public relations nightmare that calls itself Yahoo!?

The Yahoo! brand means being a vital partner in the beating, torture and imprisonment of Chinese citizens who oppose communism.

The Yahoo! brand means the safe, sure delivery of malware through the remains of Overture and Right Media.

I’m a pretty typical IT guy. My goal on every network I manage is to minimize the Yahoo! footprint. Why? Because when I see a Yahoo! start page, I know the timer is ticking on that machine becoming an infested pot of rootkitted malware.

In much of the IT world, Yahoo! is a threat to be defended against.

It isn’t so much that Yahoo! has helped deliver that malware to the desktop (although they certainly [Claria] have). It’s more of a user issue.

The same bad sort of decisions that lead a user to consider Yahoo! a useful search portal, will have them clicking “YES” in response to the “Can Hak-u.ru install pornographic advertising and keylogging software on your computer, in return for Free Smilies?” button.

Nearly every other IT guy, I’ve conversed with about Yahoo!, feels the same way; to one degree or another. Yahoo! isn’t safe for a network or it’s users.

If we care about those we serve, we’ll help them wean from the Yahoo! teat, and keep malicious Yahoo! content where it can’t hurt anyone.

Oh yea.
Shi Tao, Li Zhi and 81 currently jailed journalists and dissidents send their regards.

Thanks! Yahoo! for! aiding! and! abetting!

NV

It is sad how Yahoo, which was once the internet darling of millions of people worldwide has started declining in service, especially customer service.

They have only one way for customers to make payment for their web hosting: credit card.

And if you have any problem with your credit card, they would cancel your account. How can you blame them? With millions of web hosting customers, why should they care about losing web hosting business? Perhaps, this is why they are now having problem.

At other web hosting companies, they have multiple ways for the customer to pay: check by phone, Paypal, postal money order, bank check and others.

Yahoo has grown too big and too rich and has become bloated.

Now, all the employees are Vice-presidents, who are sit down behind computers doing nothing.

Well, I have canceled all my web-hosting services with them and started hosting with another company, where I get prompt and reasonable service.

I shall also ask all my friends and associates that I sent to them to cancel their accounts too.

December 15th, 2007
11:18 AM PT

[...] itchy Yahoo!s are sent for one last fitting of the golden handcuffs to stop them from leaving. Jerry Yang took over as CEO, but Yang proved he’s no Steve Jobs, as I don’t think anyone outside of Yahoo! has any [...]

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