Has Yahoo lost its way?
Yahoo is over 15 years old. While it was regarded as an internet pioneer, it has had the whiff of a has been for some time.
Rather than go over when and why things changed, it is worth considering the company's future in light of a press event it held to unveil a product strategy that it clearly hopes will put the company back in the running.
There is little doubt Yahoo has taken a beating in the press, in the markets and in how it is perceived.
One of a slew of recent hires brought in to turn things around under the rule of boss Carol Bartz is Blake Irving. He previously worked at Microsoft and is now Yahoo's chief products officer.
At the company's product runway, Mr Irving told reporters he wants to put the "cool" back into Yahoo and make it a company that counts.
Mr Irving has been at Yahoo for over 100 days. When he first arrived, he said, he discovered that one of the big problems was that no-one was singing from the same hymn sheet.
"When I arrived, I found there were some very excellent strategies. Labs had a great strategy, the mobile guys had a great strategy, the applications people had a strategy," Mr Irving told BBC News:
"But they weren't going in the same direction. So one of the things I did was identify some folks that could help us get on the right track with a single direction, but build a series of strategic elements that lift the overall vision and give us a single arrowhead that allows us to get behind one vision, one Yahoo strategy."
That strategy is about iterating faster, changing the feel of things, making Yahoo properties from news to sport to mail feel seamless and easier to navigate and adding common features like comments or being able to interact with friends. And doing all of this and more on connected devices like TVs, phones and tablet computers is a big part of that forward approach.
Mr Irving said he also wants to make the web - and, by that token, Yahoo - more personal:
"The vision is to deliver personal meaning whether that is on the Yahoo network or off the Yahoo network. And that notion of personal meaning is about providing an experience that you find interesting."
Mr Irving put an emphasis on social, but not the Facebook approach: in this, when you broadcast, you broadcast to everyone in your network. He talked about a Venn-diagram approach where you speak to small circles of people, the way you do in real life. Mr Irving's examples included having one type of conversation with a group of people about technology and another type of conversation with another set on golf.
As well as redefining the company to the outside world, Mr Irving wants to redefine it to people who work there. It is a technology company, he said, not a media company.
He agreed that Yahoo has to some degree lost its way and that in part has been down to the company's own identity crisis.
"A lot of losing its way is feeling like you are not a technology company any more. Part of losing your way is having folks that are deep technologists in the company read that Yahoo is a media company and reading about the departure of employees in the press. "There is this weird self-fulfilling prophecy that when you start reading all this information in the press and start hearing from your friends, you start believing it. My observation as an outsider walking in is: 'Wow, what amazing technology assets and how much swagger this company ought to have based on what they have built and are still building'."
He also hinted that in the past Yahoo shot itself in the foot by making great things but then sitting on its hands because the legacy processes and product turnaround times were all over the map:
"A huge part of my effort is to say we are working on amazing things. Let's start delivering them quickly and getting this stuff out of the door. It is letting people know that Yahoo can do this, that they are about great iterations, great customer value and great advertising value."
Mr Irving did not cringe too much at the assertion that his product runway event was a fightback for the company:
"That is a fair way to say it. All these people want to win and want to be part of a momentum to make that happen."
The $64,000 question is: Can they win?
Greg Sterling of Opus Research told the BBC "they have a little bit of the AOL disease. They are a company whose strongest days are behind them."
But, he added, they are far from down and out.
"Have they lost their mojo? Certainly, that is the perception and I think I would say they have not but things have slowed down and they need to show up with some great products."
~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~16~RS~)
Comments
Maggie, why don't you write more about that interesting article about the new Intel CPU/GPU chip that I stumbled across the other day. This blog is rather uninteresting but it seems that you do come across real technology advances sometimes - it's just a shame that the real stuff gets hidden away in the depths of the BBC website, while this useless stuff about an internet dinosaur no one cares about is easily accessible.
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Yahoo, like AOL, was never perceived as "cool" here in the UK, even 15 years ago, simply because the whole brand was perceived as too American. Their problem was that, despite launching in a global field, they failed to see beyond their own borders. So when their services arrived here, it just looked like an afterthought. A company that truly does have a global vision won't identify themselves so closely with their country of origin.
Like it or not, "cool" is a hugely important factor in a company like Yahoo's success or failure, way more important than any technological advances they may have lined up. The single best thing Yahoo could do is change their name, and rebrand/relaunch.
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I agree with Graphics.
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@ 1
I totally agree with you. There are far more interesting tech stories out there in Silicon Valley than THIS.
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Someone summed up the key issue with Yahoo search, some time ago, Yahoo try and 'tell' you where to go, Google suggest it. Google knows you, Yahoo doesn't. Yahoo's 'crass' branding, stale ideas and misaligned departments make failure inevitable and the appointment of Carol Bartz seems to have just accelerated the process. I think reporting on Yahoo is like relishing in the slow death of some injured animal. Walk away from it and let it die in peace.
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I've lost count of the number of articles that have appeared over recent years about Yahoo regaining its former crown.
I'm pretty sure if people didn't use their email service (as in the early days of webmail, it was one of the best available on a popular site) then hardly anyone would visit their website anyway, except for blog writers looking for copy, of course.
They're has-beens, they're gone, just let them go.
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