How? Yahoo! can come back

20Nov08

I had been thinking of writing this for long time, but did not get motivation to do so. Then yesterday the decision of Jerry to step down kind of compelled me to put on my thoughts on to the web.

Well in short I would say Jerry is the right CEO for the Yahoo! and his decision to step down is unfortunate. Seems like the main reason for stepping down is that he messed up with Microsoft deal (of which I really favored) but because of one bad decision you took in past doesn’t mean you should take another bad decision.

I was an Yahoo! employee few years back, after that started my own startup and at the same time have been in many companies to continue pay bills till things pick up.

My experience says Yahoo! has a really good technological platform, it has a very high visibility on internet – it’s still number one portal in terms of number of hits, it has really good products to continue making people visit it – such as, frontpage, mail, search, finance, games, personal, answers etc etc.

But what it mainly lacks is – the will power to succeed and moral of the employees to drive the company to the top again. The main reason has been the upper middle and the mid middle management layer (all those VPs, directors, Sr. Managers etc). Leaving few, most of them act as parasite for Yahoo! and looking at the reason why – most of them are incompetent, sort sighted and their only goal is to expand their team so that their resume would look good. They hardly care about the company or where it is heading.

Result, the innovative minds in the company get frustrated – no one likes to work under idiots or selfish management.

Secondly, Yahoo! listen to wrong people and has stopped working based on common sense. I have bunch of friends who work in data mining team, and when I listen to their talks I wonder does Yahoo! take its users’ as computers or real people? because they make decisions just based on data-mining results and no common sense is ever involved. A very typical example is http://search.yahoo.com/ on opening that page my first response usually is – is there something wrong with this page? and yes there is, they can keep their logo at the top of search box, as all other search engines do, but no, they won’t because their data mining says otherwise and they want to be different.

Third, Yahoo! copies the products but at the same time wants to be different instead of being better, and this is sheer foolishness. For e.g., they came up with Panama – a product which was to be a next version of Overture and a copy of Googles’s adwords. They did copy from Google and instead of making it better than Google they just made it different – and output – people find it extremely difficult to use and confusing, I myself tried to signup and use it for my websites but I had to give up in frustration.  What is wrong with Yahoo? instead of hiring 100s of PhDs and MBAs paying them 150K or more without any result, why not to hire 1 good product manager and a team of real testers and a team which would carry out usability test with real users.

Fourth, I think Yahoo! sowed the seed of downfall the day it started to propagate the concept of leadership in the company. Result, everyone prefer to be a leader in Yahoo! by stepping on each other, because in Yahoo! leadership comes without accountability and reasons, this promotes dirty politics. If I am bossy and if I can somehow increase my team size I will be considered as leader. If I can show you down in a meeting or I can increase my voice, I will be more visible. Doesn’t matter what I output or where my team is heading or even if I am a complete moron.

Instead if Yahoo! start to focus more on concept of innovation, concept of reasons and accountability and towards an environment where people don’t want to be on top of each other instead they would like to compete to get new innovative products out in the market and to get more revenue-in for the company. Yahoo! should promote the culture where team member or a team would not feel to be loosing something in helping another team member or team. If you have problems doing it, go to Google and Microsoft, observe them and come back with similar plannings.

Fifth, and more importantly, Yahoo! should monetize its products, which it can very well do. Yes, Mail! it is a huge giant! and a very good platform to promote search. Also monetize it by showing the keywords targeted ads, as Google does on gmail. I have many times asked this question to my friends in Yahoo! and answer I get is – Yahoo!s legal team says its privacy violation!!! – what the heck! fire such legal team and hire or borrow the legal team from Google.

Improve your search, I saw few days back Yahoo! coming out with the Search Monkey, to be very frank it again looks like making monkey out of yourself. Yahoo! search is bad and not as good as Google not because they do not present results in a proper way, it is because they do not have the proper result in their indexing servers. Their intent-based classification and keywords indexing and crawling is not that smart. They should focus on making it better. [I have designed few simple algos for this, may be will implement them once I have some free time and sell to Yahoo! or MSN ], but the point is if they have just 2-3 guys with common-sense in a decision making position then they can easily improve their search. And if one seriously wants some pointers – message me.

Increase the login expiry time on cookies, this is an out-of-the-way comment, but it’s really needed and can reduce the frustration of lot of old yahoo users who have migrated to their own laptop or PCs from cybercafe PCs.

Look into ways to monetize, Answers.yahoo.com, as very intended users visit these pages. Show ads here not as advertisement but as a help to users to find the needed product as per their intent.

Start your auctions.yahoo again and this time be tough on spammers and scammers, make the listings paid. Ebay is making sellers bleed and frustrate, this is the right time to hit this market, before Amazon eats it all.

Acquire, WordPress.com it will help create good buzz for yahoo among bloggers when needed, and can greatly help yahoo promote search among these influencers (bloggers) on the internet …

Look into engaging the users on front page a little more. I have thought of one feature which a lot of people may find useful and may start to use if Yahoo implements it, may be I will discuss it sometime later.

I do have lot more to say, but I will stop here as I do not have time right now, my partner is pinging me to finish the business plan document.

But in short, instead of every time changing direction and seeking new CEO, what Yahoo! need is one insider (who understands Yahoo! and cares for it) to stand up and take CEOs job and clean up the internal mess with an iron hand. Jerry is a good candidate for this, except – he lacks iron hand and is too soft. May be Filo can complement him in these areas as an invisible CEO helper.

I would say Yahoo! is the only potential company out there to challenge Google dominance in search and in other products. The only thing Yahoo! lacks is WILL POWER, which should come from its founders! – Jerry and Filo.

Filed under: Can Yahoo fly again?   |  1 Comment
Tags: What does Yahoo! need, Yahoo can come back without Microsoft, Yahoo vs Google