Yahoo! VP Calls For a Shakeup

prostoalex writes, "Yahoo!'s Senior VP Brad Garlinghouse sent out a company-wide memo calling for layoffs of 15-20% of Yahoo! staff and reversal of priorities to concentrate on major issues facing the company. (The Wall Street Journal posted a copy of the memo.) MarketWatch quotes Garlinghouse: 'I've heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular. I hate peanut butter. We all should.'"

Google could be accused of the same thing

[Salvance]

Both Yahoo and Google this year have introduced a mind-blowing number of new services that make it easy to accuse either of spreading themselves too thin. Remember when Google said they'd only offer search, not chat or finance pages or horoscopes? Right, now they've also added 30+ other products (luckily they've stayed away from horoscopes for now).

The difference between the two is that Google has at least devoted the resources to improving upon their key product (search), while Yahoo has a difficult time defining what their key product is. I'm sure Brad Garlinghouse (being the VP of Mail) of the memo would say it's Yahoo! Mail, but if you were to interview every VP you'd likely get a different answer.

As an example of their lack of focus, look at the homepage. One week it focuses on news stories, the next it focuses on some random $50,000 video contest. This may keep people entertained, but it also reflects the lack of consistency inherent in the organization (or shows the bread through the peanut butter as Brad might say).

Having worked at Yahoo...

[Anonymous Coward]

..and having left pretty recently, I have to say this is right on the money. Too many VPs, senior VPs, and directors who just go to meetings all day and don't contribute anything except to get large bonuses (which the engineers rarely see). Properties which have large teams but haven't gotten any updates in years (Calendar, My Yahoo, just to name a couple), which were supposed to have released stuff months ago for "beta", but of course haven't. Stupid acquisitions (Bix, wtf??) instead of just concentrating on what they're good at (go back to the properties update), and duplication of efforts (Flickr, Photos, and last I heard, there were 3 different bookmarking technologies).

On top of all that, there's very little communication between properties so you see lots of duplication of effort, or something that'd be useful to one section of the company which nobody except the designers of that cool thing know about.

I enjoyed working at the company, but I agree it needs a major shakeup. Can the CEO for starters.

Same old same old ... Bye Bye Yahoo.

[Jack9]

Yahoo had cutbacks last year at this time as well. The entire culture is bankrupt (from the veterans' point of view). Young people with fresh ideas and no discipline. Lower employment standards, lower benefits (if you're lucky enough to avoid contractor-dom), inferior products. The smart money sold their Yahoo stock LAST year. I'm trying to think of 1 service that is synonymous with Yahoo and I can't...but I have memorized a number of audio clips (commercials/IM). That's just what I've gotten from my friends who work there (check the blogs, you'll see the sentiments and realities). This spokeshole announcement is just delayed reaction to machinations set in motion long ago. For the few that care enough, plz post about what Yahoo's doing that's fantastic and new that's showing growth.

P.S.
This is not ANTI YAHOO FUD, but my personal conclusions from what I know. Take it with a grain of salt and an eye for how you can find out for yourself.

There are some sites that already do this!

[Salvance]

Unbelievably to me, some sites can already ascertain your character using little real info. For example, "www.LikeBetter.com guesses your physical and personality characteristics just by which pictures you like. Every 10 or so pictures you can click on the brain at the bottom and it tells you what it knows about you. I couldn't believe how accurate it was ... After about 10 rounds, it had given me 20 characteristics, only 1 was incorrect.

Re:Google could be accused of the same thing

[nelsonal]

Google's also free, and it seems to be pulling down a decent chunk. I think their biggest problem is that the really valuable portion of the target market for subscription services has already been captured by things like Bloomberg. Perhaps they should start a brokerage and push their own trading platform.

Re:Google could be accused of the same thing

[TheRaven64]

Interesting. Everyone I know who is a geek uses Jabber (and a few non-geeks now use Google Talk, since they already had gmail accounts). Of the remainder, everyone I know in Europe uses MSN Messenger, everyone I know in the USA and Japan uses AIM. The only people I've met who use Y!IM (and there have been very few) also use one of the other two, so I've never felt the need to install the Y!IM transport on my Jabber server.

Re:Danger: PHB at work

[kisrael]

Heheh, a few years ago I heard someone suggest how Saturn could have remained unique: by going ALL hybrid, and the focus of GM's pushes in that direction... they could have kept up their mandate of being a "different" car company, even if the management thing had dragged them back into the fold.

I thought it was a cool idea, anyway.