Yahoo Shakes Things Up 73
PreacherTom writes "Growing strife inside Yahoo! has erupted into a sweeping management and organizational shakeup. CEO Terry Semel announced yesterday that the company will be reordered into three groups: one to focus on advertisers and publishers, another to focus on Yahoo!'s base of over 500 million users, and a third on technology and development. While Semel denies layoffs are in the future, there will be replacements in the upper echelon for the world's most popular website. The changes, the most extensive at Yahoo in more than five years, cap months of speculation about how it would respond to slowing sales growth, a slumping stock price, and a steady stream of executive departures in the past year."
Yahoo is in trouble (Score:5, Interesting)
Steve Wiseman
http://www.windows-admin-tools.com [windows-admin-tools.com]
Re:Yahoo is in trouble (Score:5, Interesting)
Yahoo has spent too much time accumulating services that are not "best of breed" by any means, but are simply reactions to the offerings of others. They don't even really know what kind of company they want to be, or even what business they're in (other than "the web"), and until they figure that out, they're going to continue to flail madly while they spiral down the drain.
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That's pretty common in business. The last thing you want to be accused of as an exec is being passive in the face of danger, and so any action is better than none (which is arguably true!). Sometimes reorganization - even aimless reorganization - is the one tool you have in your box, and the adage about everything looking like a nail when all you have
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A subsidiary at the time, as I recall...
Re:Yahoo is in trouble (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Yahoo is in trouble (Score:4, Insightful)
Yahoo is a lot more than just search. Google is too, but the point is your web site results are not reflective of Yahoo's business as a whole. While they do want a bigger piece of the search advertising pie, I don't think even they really consider search their core business anymore. (It never really was to begin with; they were always more of a directory than a search company, though they've tried to change that in recent years.)
All you need to do is go to Yahoo's web site and then go to Google's web site to see their different business models.
Just for one example, though, I bought my house through Yahoo Real Estate, which partnered with Prudential in my area to give local online real estate listings. Google has no such thing (even though with Google Maps, it would seem a natural fit). Yahoo has many facets like this that you probably don't even realize.
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Neither do I nor many others. So?
Maybe their facets aren't that interesting for most people...
...or they hide them in more facets
...or their products aren't that good
...or don't have the right timing
...or what ever.
Take it how you want, they are having a problem somewhere and not being a search company anymore might be one part of it.
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Since they could not find any on the first page, you may have gotten subsequent page hits while they scour your site for download links.
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In related news... (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'm expecting Yahoo's Movies section to get unusable next.
And last time I tried to access the "old" Yahoo mail, I co
TV Listings (Score:2)
Beta??? This came out two weeks ago. It is *SLOW*.
I went to AOL!TV instead.
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I discovered tv.com is good. And I also discovered excite.com has a great tv listing! Too bad they don't let you store your settings (maybe they do if you have an account with them, but I didn't want to do that).
It's a shame. The Yahoo TV listings used to be the best. Of course, so did their mapping before google maps became so amazing. Maybe we'll get lucky and soon get tv.google.com...
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I've been using this site for a little while.
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TV Guide's listing do OK for SeaMonkey/Linux but just hang and don't deliver anything on my wife's Firefox/Windows machine.
Sorry. At this point, the New
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E.G. 9:43AM. I want the 9AM listings, not the 10AM listings.
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What do you expect? (Score:4, Funny)
Here's an idea (Score:2, Funny)
Would you please... (Score:2)
Feared!
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Thank you (Score:2)
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Tho give 'em a couple more years to finish cutting themselves down to size, and "Lilliputian.com" may be more appropriate.
The problem with going public (Score:2, Insightful)
In private hands the company leaders may be indulged to take risks that a public
*Cough* Bullh!t *Cough* (Score:2, Interesting)
right, 500 million unique users? I'm surprised they didn't claim to still be the world's most popular search engine, surely they would with those figures.
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That's a real number. Yahoo actually has some fairly strict auditing process for calculating those numbers. Why doesn't this make them the most popular search engine? The reasons are many:
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As for the number of unique users on the Internet, the estimates I've seen put it at ~1 billion, which means roughly half of them visit Yahoo once a month (the "unique visitors" figure is always couched in the context of "per mo
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Yahoo Spread Itself Thin (Score:5, Insightful)
Oddly enough, I have found Yahoo's search to be more accurate than Google for certain topics. Google has always been great when doing narrow searches and it used to be pretty good at wide searches too, but lately I have been finding that I need to go through several pages to find what I am looking for on a wide Google search. I got fed up with this, so I tried Yahoo search and I was pleasantly surprised. Yahoo seems to consistently provide the results I look for within the first few entries. I'm not saying that Yahoo search is better than Google, but it seems like Google doesn't appear to be the magic bullet that it used to be.
Yahoo really went down the shitter (Score:1)
Three envelopes (Score:5, Funny)
After about six months, the stock slumps. The new CEO opens the first envelope. It says "Blame your predecessor". He holds a press conference and confidence in the company is restored.
Another six months pass and another crisis arises. He opens the second envelope. It says "Reorganize the company". He does so and the crisis passes.
After a year, things are terrible. The stock price is in a downward spiral. The CEO opens the third envelope. It says "Go get three envelopes
Re: Predecessors (Score:1)
Will they start listening to their users? (Score:2)
Playing fast and loose with the numbers (Score:1)
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Yes, that makes sense. Surely Google has more people than actually use the Internet.... ;-)
Seriously, Yahoo is rated (by third parties) as having more traffic than any other site (the home page used to be #1, by has been eclipsed by MySpace, and yes, that means both get more traffic than Google's home page). Most of Yahoo's services a
The appeal of working for Yahoo... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The appeal of working for Yahoo... (Score:4, Interesting)
Judging the appeal of a company based on the CEO (or even the top management) is like judging the ride of a car by looking at the hood ornament.
Yahoo! is a great place to work. We may not have officially sanctioned "20% time off" policies, but there's a lot of freedom to find your own calling.
Tomorrow (Thursday) is an internal "Hack Day", and Yahoo!s all over the world will be churning out interesting/cool projects in an informal competition. It's loads of fun.
The biggest advantage of Yahoo! as an employer is that there is such a wide variety of projects to work on. You want to work on a project doing, say, TV on a mobile device? I'm sure there's a group working on that.
CEO is no hood ornament (Score:2)
Like it or not, the execs control the fate of the company much more than the workers. The CEO can single handedly ruin the company - a single foot soldier cannot - this is why the person at the top gets paid the big bucks.
The key for the execs is to bring all of that coolness you describe into alignment with business goals - which is easier said than done.
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Perfect example of what is wrong with Yahoo! This reads like something out of 2000 during the dot com boom -- not 2006.
20% time off?!?! How about 20% pay cut?
no more casual TV listings (Score:1)
The TV listings were the last reason I had to go use Yahoo, which is sad in a way as I used to be a big fan of almost everything they did before they went all corporate.
Why yahoo sucks... (Score:2)
Till GMAIL introduced the increased storage limits the yahoos who run Yahoo was sleeping. The interface of Yahoo Mail is the worst. The standard webmail interface of my company is better designed.
The Yahoo messenger in its default installed state is a classic example of a cluttered bloated design. Plus why should I see an annoying flash ad in the bottom pane? At least put a t
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I think it's fair to say that the gmail move caught everyone by surprise. That said Yahoo responded with increased limits within a month (which is very impressive if you consider they had to scale up to *100 million users* having that increased storage in that time, while gmail still doesn't have to worry about tha
too little too late? (Score:1)
Need to fire more people (Score:1)
I worked at Yahoo for a year, in the Media Group. While the departure of Lloyd Braun is a step in the right direction for the Media Group at least, it is not enough to solve Yahoo's problems. The technology leaders at Yahoo, starting with Farzad Nazeem and including others such as Phu Hoang, provide no leadership. There is no organized approach to development, just a bunch of people randomly creating product. The lead technologists think PHP is a good language. Worse than that, the ineptitude of the technic
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No Layoffs? (Score:3, Funny)
Layoffs, which at least one Yahoo executive had called for, are not in the plans.
Yahoo! also announced that they expect to overtake Google, in both market share and profitability, later this month thanks to their new strategic partnership with Santa Claus. An expected deal with the Easter Bunny should enhance their second quarter results.
Yahoo search suck because of paid inclusion (Score:1)
They don't care about users. (Score:2)
Somehow my Inbox got screwed and that started a voyage of pain I wish not in my worst enemy.
Basically every person that replied to me thought either:
a) I was computer illiterate.
b) I was an idiot.
the tone of the messages was patronizing to the extreme and nobody seemed to be prepared to engage in trying to solve the issue.
Their last message basically confirmed that I am derranged:
> Thank you for writing to