Yahoo & Yang's 100-Day Report Card
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?
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
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.
They’re making the venture capital guys happy with their company shopping…
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.