GigaOM

I’m sorry, but this is a very superficial analysis of the problem at yahoo. Conglomerates offer no added value to hareholder nor the employees. Stockpiling properties for the sake of “verticalization” and pure marketshare is simply a 1960s version of a “strategy” - and this is what you are proposing. . .

the deeper problems is how is yahoo with so many disparate properties (verticals) going to offer shareholder value ABOVE AND BEYOND what each property can offer independently. Just adding/buying more companies will simply exacerbate the inertia and “peanut butter” problem so well discussed previously. Marketshare does not equal profitability, growth, or economic value. Acquisition does not equal shareholder value. (you rather be a shareholder in GM or Toyota?)

furthremore, you can talk about “monetization” all you want without telling people how. Its like saying we need a better search algorithm in 1997 without inventing pagerank . . . completely obvious but unconstructive.

Interesting stats on job boards, Sramana. I’m still suprised that Monster are still doing to well despite charging such a premium for their service and offering little in the way of innovation.

We’ll have to wait and see how the Yahoo! Life! suite pans out. They have a lot of integration to do with last years social networking acquisitions, i.e. Flickr, MyBlogLog and Delicious. And I’m not too sure about the idea of putting Delicious icons in to Yahoo! search results…

This is the best blog post I’ve read in a very long time. I believe you have hit the nail on the head.
I also have looked at YHOO businesses and come to the brlieve that YHOO needs to focus on VERTICALS. Web 3.0 will be lead by Healthcare. Just take a look at the number of vertical health properties that were funded last year and this market has NOT participated in any significant change during web 1.0 and web 2.0.

The Zip Realty perspective is interesting. Not sure you’d get much proprietary IP with the acquisition. But, what you could gain is entrance into a HUGE market at the local level. Yup, why not acquire Zip and pay close to book value and start offering Yahoo Small Business (advertising) services from these brick and mortar offices. Talk about getting to the last mile (telco term).

similar idea to what FedEx did by buying Kinkos or UPS buying Mail Boxes Etc. Except, hopefully, executing on the model<<

Yahoo needs to continue to either buy or build more intereting products/services to engage the younger web users, to enter Web3.0 — much like their grabbing del.icio.us and Flickr to signify entry to Web2.0 before… Twitter is one obvious target.

I think Yahoo needs some good Financiual Strategy Advisors and also some good Marketing staff. One top level stategist Marketer could turn it around for Yahoo.

http://tekno-world.blogspot.com

[...] admin article is brought to you using rss feeds.Here you will find the latest real estate news for buying and selling homes.In 2007, total ad spending on real estate dropped 3 percent, but online advertising soared 25.8 percent to $2.6 billion due to a shift to online from print. Yahoo doesn’t have much of a presence in online real estate — ZipRealty is a … [...]

Yahoo was pretty big in the old days when it was the search engine of choice. Now, Google has taken that place because it gives people what they need - a search engine that works FAST. Imagine using the MSN website as your home page, as is default with Internet explorer…. those excruciating moments of the pain of waiting is enough to think about making a switch to a different homepage. What about the home page on Safari? It makes the belief of fast browser-startup go away.

Yahoo probably has the resources to get working towards Web 3.0 and since it isn’t focused on a minimalist interface, it could perhaps even get there.

Great post that highlights what I’ve called Yahoo’s infatuation with second place. I don’t know the company well enough to comment on the acquisition ideas, but looking at organic growth the peanut butter manifesto definitely resonated. From the outside it seems like everything is held up by the lack of a focused strategy. I get the whole “essential starting point of your life” thing, but that seems more like an idea or a vision. I have not seen clear, compelling action lined up behind that idea.

Can anyone believe that up until February 2004, Yahoo’s results were provided by Google. The companies parted ways as the competition for web users grew. I quite agree to “Yahoo can become the jewel of Web 3.0″ after seeing tht revamped Yahoo mobile portal. But i dont knwo why Yahoo has made their new widget enabled mobile web portal rather hard to find. IM sure Yahoo will suppport new phones with the new portal soon.

Parul Bindra
http://bhopu.com – Web 2.0 Blog

Yahoo is losing market cap because it’s gone too big. It doesn’t manage to be innovative and agile enough to compete successfully in the Internet. It reminds me of what AMD has done to Intel.

An interesting fact is that Yahoo, across all their properties, is still leading the race. But, judging by the growth rate of the Google properties (and maybe also Facebook…) it won’t last for long.

Eyal,
http://www.sutree.com

Aren’t we ready for a “Super Portal”, and couldn’t Yahoo be that? A website that collected everything we do and access on the web, such as Blogs, News, Social Sites, Mail, Shopping etc etc. The underlying sites for that Mail, Social Network Shopping etc wouldn’t necessarily be Yahoo, but could be Facebook, Googlemail and any other. It feels to me like the time is right for someone to bring some structure and simplicity into all the different kinds of activities, and I can’t see anyone better positioned that Yahoo.

At Yahoo, you have a deadly combination of arrogance and low morale. The very senior folks are still very arrogant, running around the world tempting little start-ups with their talk of acquisition while their ‘rank and file” play with the tumbleweeds bouncing down the hallways. They are losing in many key areas and do NOT stand for anything anymore. Yahoo is a dying company — will take many years to shrink in size, but shrink it will.

Agreed - this is a very good post. Yahoo! has huge upside potential.

Yahoo! has for years had problems not just with monetization, but generally with thinking through their products and completing them. While Apple shows us how important it is to focus on critical features and pare away complexity, a lesson taken (perhaps too far) by Google, Yahoo! often lets ‘bolt-on’ features or graphics pile up on both their browser-based and client-based applications, and their QA is inadequate.

On the browser side, there is the ugly, puffy interface for adding new content to a MyYahoo! page. Big logos, no tags, no ‘popular packages’, no social links, no third-party brand promotion. On the client side, the Yahoo! Messenger sets off a small circus every time it launches, and the toolbar looks like a 1994 design. Their new webmail interface is beautiful at least, but s…l…o….w.

Their initial version of Wallet made it impossible to recover your secret user key (different from your password) unless you knew the birthday you had supplied with your account (tough luck for typos or amnesic privacy freaks), forcing users to open new mail accounts if they lost this code.

Their first Music client was so shaky that it felt like a UFC cage match to get it off of my computer.

Such indifference to product quality has made it obvious for years that the company has been suffering from sloppy management.

These lapses are all the more frustrating because of the company’s history of invention. Their original webmail stayed the best out there for years. MyYahoo! was a brilliant initial execution, from UI to incorporation of multiple feeds, to feature integration through in-house widgets. Sports still leads the pack, getting better every year. Just the idea of putting all these things together…

I root for Yahoo! (believe it or not), and it is sad to see them piss away inspired products with partial, shoddy execution. I hope they lay off the right people and re-work their product management or engineering to get back on track.

[...] a refocusing of the company’s strategy, the blogosphere is full of speculation and advice. At GigaOm Sramana Mitra wrote that Yahoo needs to monetize its half a billion users better and should go on an acquisition binge [...]

Good post though personally, I think any turn-around strategy has to include shoring up their existing suite of applications. I’ve written a post titled “After 10 years I’m seemingly still a stranger to Yahoo” where I discuss the issues I have with Yahoo which I think are low hanging fruit:

http://www.stevetrefethen.com/blog/After10YearsImSeeminglyStillAStrangerToYahoo.aspx

Regardless, I join your call to Yahoo to put up a fight!

[...] is reportedly planning to lay off hundreds of employees in an effort to rein in its budget and revive its flagging fortunes. The job cuts are expected to number around 500, out of 14,000 employees globally, though initial [...]

[...] GigaOM agrees, openly hoping that Yahoo will put up a real fight. [...]

[...] is that “1,500-2,500 jobs may be eliminated in the next two weeks.” (There’s an interesting post on GigaOM on how Yahoo can still turn itself around.) Heck, even Comcast is battling right now. (Though [...]

Let’s not confuse monetization with non-linear market growth. Verticalization may well be the key to Y! making more money, but it has nothing to do with whatever the next Internet cycle will be. Dotcom I was dial-up internet, Web2 has been consumer broadband, and the third Internet cycle will also be tied to an order of magnitude improvement in connectivity that allows an entirely new class of horizontal applications to disrupt the status quo.

not possible until yahoo go after to innovations than cosmetic widgets…

Nice post. Like you I like the potential of Yahoo however they need to make some changes.

You missed a big piece of the puzzle. Opensocial and the platform issues required to compete. I agree with Scott Rafer that the new opportunities are the lever Yahoo needs to harness.

http://furrier.org/2008/01/14/yahoo-please-join-opensocial-hey-jerry-yang-go-social-and-get-open-now-its-all-jelly/

I think you make a good business and financial case for this verticalisation strategy but from a technology and user-experience perspective, I think Yahoo is too fragmented as it is. It seems to have too many parts, most of which are not integrated.

As I commented in a 2007 post on Read/WriteWeb about Yahoo, much is being made of development platforms but there is something to be said for creating platforms that serve as glue between multiple properties, either belonging to the same parent company or owned by separate business entities. Yahoo needs such a platform and until it figures out a way to integrate the different fragments it already has, I would argue that it should hold off on bringing yet more fragments in. Oh and before anyone suggests it, an RSS-fuser like Yahoo Pipes doesn’t count as a proper platform in the way that I mean.

[...] Mitra, writing over on GigaOm today, implores Yahoo to Please Put Up A Fight. He writes: Yet another segment that is moving online is real estate classifieds. Borell Associates [...]

Sramana, I wonder if you or any of the other commenters have Yahoo mail ids. Yes, Yahoo has a lot of points of entry into the web world, but their backbone is their email service (or maybe that’s my perception).

Me and a lot of my friends who have Yahoo email ids, were all looking forward to the new email interface. And to tell you the truth, it SUCKS, big, big time. Maybe it’s great in broadband USA and South Korea but in the rest of the world, the way it loads is not worth a startup’s salt. And to think that Yahoo employs Douglas Crockford, the Javascript Guru!!

For me, that is just one of the issues.

Take POP3 access - Yahoo still doesn’t provide POP3 access to all their email ids. Surprisingly, if you do take a yahoo.co.in email id, it comes as a default! I’ve had a Yahoo email id since they were only Yahoo.com, but I don’t seem to deserve the service that they provide to their newer account holders!

Take their storage space - Yahoo started with their unlimites storage space long after Gamil. They just seemed to appear as a ‘me-too’ company.

And as a last straw, Gmail is providing FREE IMAP access. Which Yahoo doesn’t even provide to their paid Business Users!!

This kind of attitude would be unpardonable for a startup. And for an established organisation, this is not only unforgivable, but it’s reputation lost.

Sadly, today, when it comes to email, Yahoo just appears as a staid company trying it’s hardest to keep up and failing even so.

For me, that’s just not good enough. After ages of sticking with Yahoo mail, I’ve finally switched over to Gmail. Although, it takes a bunch of effort to notify everyone of the new email id, I’ve just had enough of Yahoo’s slow interfaces, lack of functionality, and in the days of Web 2.0, looking like a dinosaur on it’s way to extinction.

I wonder, if we had the ‘email id portability’ along the lines of ‘number portability’ for mobiles, how many of even PAID Yahoo Business Users would stick with Yahoo.

I think some of their properties badly need a facelift. E.g: y! groups should’ve taken the advantage of social networking, because thats what people were using for some kind of networking and information sharing. But, that has stayed stale for a long time.

I agree with some of the comments about New Yahoo main, even though their intention is laudable, implementation has been disappointment with JS errors and compatibility issues with browser versions etc.

This note looks more like an academic strategy class exercise but in reality, Yahoo’s problems seem much more than that. If its just buying properties(which they are already doing) and getting money(difficult part), they could have done that as mentioned in one of the comments. It would be interesting to take into perspective what competition would be doing while yahoo executes this strategy.
The question they have to ask for each and every product(service) they offer it as paid-only, would the user be willing to pay for it. (I doubt about most users). Also monetization metrics and data need be relooked into than attributing no. of users, page views, traffic etc which is old school.

ooops, I was talking about New Yahoo Mail. It was mis-typed as Yahoo Main !!

[...] Yahoo, Please Put Up A Fight - GigaOM Why, if Y! puts up a fight, it can become the dominant player of Web3.0, from Sramana Mitra (tags: sramana-mitra yahoo web3.0 business strategy) [...]

[...] GigaOm column, Yahoo Please Put Up A Fight discusses all those things we have been talking about for a while [...]

[...] GigaOm column, Yahoo Please Put Up A Fight discusses all those things we have been talking about for a while [...]

I think you set off a tidal wave of responses. I agree that Yahoo’s positioning in the Verticals is a key strategy. It is probably better positioned for the information age than other publishing conglomerates like News Corp (but they are coming fast).

In addition to the verticals you mentioned, you forgot to discuss their position in the music area (with the bungled acquisition of MusicMatch Jukebox) The problem is that Web 2.0 and 3.0 demand more than being a series of verticals. Yahoo has all the properties to be our digital living room, yet they have not integrated all the pieces. I understand that solid integration takes time, but the first steps should be a “super portal” (as mentioned by an above commenter) that presents all the pieces to the consumer in a user friendly way.

Maybe Yahoo needs a “jelly” manifesto to go with the peanut butter one they already had.

Yahoo should give up on doing search and trying to compete with Google in various ways. They should concentrate on services/features like: Flickr, Del.icio.us and Upcoming; continue to do things like adding support for OpenID and other standards; make their IMAP free to all and just use Google Adsense (or not) to make money. By giving up the battle for Search King they could beat Google everywhere else. I know that sounds crazy but its something to consider.

[...] now? There simply is no excuse how badly those people have executed.  Clearly its time to ‘put up a fight‘ or die and get bought.  I like Kara’s line Yahoo can’t cut itself into greatness.  [...]

Very interesting. Great post. I hate to present this view as it is very “Gekko” but it seems Yahoo could unlock more value to shareholders through a break up than as a standalone entity. Its obvious that its investments (Japan and Baidu) are worth more than its core, and its the core that holds the juicy, vertical properties that command high valuations. Could Private Equity or a strategic player with balls make a bid? Who knows….

[...] Excellent, excellent article on GigaOM from someone who clearly shares my mystification at why Yahoo, with its massive audience, can’t seem to mint money the way that Google does.  Here’s where the confusion comes from; see how the little red line is above the little [...]

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While revenue might be $180M they loss money. How is that helpful to growing the bottom line at Y!?

And I thought that Brownian Motion meant shit. Quite apposite in the situation here.

[...] Yahoo, Please Put Up A Fight An interesting take on how Yahoo can turn it around. - GigaOM (tags: yahoo business) SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “links for 2008-01-23″, url: “http://www.teamkanestreet.com/blog/2008/01/23/links-for-2008-01-23/” }); [...]

[...] pare absolut normal avind in vedere ca pierderile in valoare de piata au fost, pentru companie, de peste 20 de miliarde $ in ultimii doi ani, ceea ce nu a facut decat sa alimenteze, si sa-l faca si mai evident, conflictul pentru suprematie [...]

@abhijit, are you still using dial up? cause the new Yahoo mail on my computer looks fantastic and its loading really fast, actually even slight faster than GMail which I can not stand the sluggish “loading” screen. This is quite an achievement considering Yahoo Mail has a much heavier UI than GMail.

[...] post by Guest Column This entry is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the [...]

I recently was a big fan of yahoo. Since the changes to mail, I can’t use it on some computers. It’s just to hard to use the new mail. And the search is just awful.

Yes, yahoo please, put up a fight!!

i seriously hate Yahoo. They are the dinosaur of all web portal parasites and offer nothing that isn’t available better elsewhere. They destroyed eGrouos and Konfabulator with their blinkered corporate greed. Their search sucks and their webmail is the joke of all webmails. Yahoo remind me of PDQ Bach: “His plagiarism was limited only by his faulty technique.” Even with Adblock their site still manages to piss me off. At least America on Langley gave us IM. What will it say on Yahoo’s gravestone?

Will nailed it in the first comment. Let me add the answer to his monetization question: micropayments.

[...] seems to have some advice. So far, Sramana Mitra at GigaOM seems to have the most agreed upon take on the [...]

Yahoo! is what happens when you let the “hippy dippies” run the company. The people they acquired were moved into VP positions and quickly learned about their lack of clothing. Basically, Yahoo is still in the “dot com” phase (oh snap! he did not!!!) (oh yes, I did…).

[...] Can it become competitive again? Sramana Mitra made a passionate call to Yahoo to fight back in her guest post at GigaOm. I am going to approach it from a different angle. I feel that Yahoo has the necessary tools it [...]

They used to have the best finance message boards any where. Then they screwed them up and totally ignored the user backlash and massive amount of begging to go back to the original interface (”We’re trying to provide you with the best user interface. You make take some time to get used to the new features.”). What a bunch of nits.

[...] still because it has tremendous traffic and a tremendous brand,” said Mitra, who posted her Yahoo analysis on the popular technology blog GigaOM. “But it can’t figure out what it wants to be [...]

[...] still because it has tremendous traffic and a tremendous brand,” said Mitra, who posted her Yahoo analysis on the popular technology blog GigaOM. “But it can’t figure out what it wants to be [...]

[...] Microsoft starting to ramp up their mobile online offerings, this is one area where Yahoo needs to flex their muscle. Share/Send Sphere Print Previous [...]

I would highly recommend that the author read a book named “Good to Great” which reveals a very interesting fact - Strategy did NOT differentiate the great companies from their counterparts. All the talk about strategy is really without merit. How Yahoo is in THE most promising position to be able to leverage Web 3.0, is beyond comprehension. I thought web 3.0 which came about from semantic web concept in all its glory will make Google’s business model obsolete and last time I checked yahoo was trying to have the same ad based revenue model! It appears to me that the analysis presented is naive at best… There doesn’t seem to be any research to support any of the claims…

[...] in the hundreds. Yahoo’s stock been on a downward march for two years partly because, as GigaOm reports, it’s losing big to Google. TechCrunch hopes the layoff number will be on the high [...]