I loved Yahoo, it was like web equivalent of first crush back in High school. But Yahoo is dying albeit slowly. Compare this to Apple of mid 90's when it was almost dead. Now imagine you are The Steve Jobs and your task is to not only save Yahoo but bring it back to top place. How would you do it ? (Selling out is not an option, please!)
Ask HN: How would you save Yahoo and bring it back to top place ?
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Re: Ask HN: How would you save Yahoo and bring it back to top place ?
#2man. i'd take the CEO job in a heartbeat.
Re: Ask HN: How would you save Yahoo and bring it back to top place ?
#3Nice try, new Yahoo CEO. ;)
All kidding aside, they need to focus on some core products to start stabilizing their presence again. Give Flickr good leadership. Make Delicious a priority product. Figure out if the search product is worth maintaining.
Above all, they need someone scrappy and clever to lead, not just contain the flailing of their tentacles.
Re: Ask HN: How would you save Yahoo and bring it back to top place ?
#4One of the first things Jobs did when he returned was streamline Apple's products. If you go to Yahoo.com now, you see about 12 things on the left-hand side that are essentially "WTF?"; things Yahoo shouldn't be doing (and that's before going to Everything.Yahoo.com for the complete list of random garbage). Yahoo should be focusing on its strengths and mercilessly removing everything else.
Yahoo has always been pretty good at apps: cross-platform Messenger, an impressive web mail interface for the iPad that looks almost native, etc. They are a web and design powerhouse, if only somebody told them. This is expertise that can be sold; they need to continue building a small number of apps to demonstrate their prowess, and contract this out to develop anything for anyone (e.g. make Yahoo the go-to place for high quality mobile apps for the iPhone?). Even throw the free software community a bone by pulling a Nokia (the old Nokia) and making a Qt-like dual-license so their services have even greater reach.
Yahoo is also a decent source of news, but they aren't pushing this enough. With a bit of care and attention they could clean up the mess that is modern media and give people a really desirable digital newspaper...something that everyone would want as their home page.
Find and fire the people in their company who build toolbars and installers that push toolbars. The last thing any company needs is to be connected with something that users may loathe.
That's just off the top of my head. :)
Re: Ask HN: How would you save Yahoo and bring it back to top place ?
#5Nice try, new Yahoo CEO. ;) All kidding aside, they need to focus on some core products to start stabilizing their presence again. Give Flickr good leadership. Make Delicious a priority product. Figure out if the search product is worth maintaining. Above all, they need someone scrappy and clever to lead, not just contain the flailing of their tentacles.
Delicious can't be a priority project; they sold it off a few months ago to the YouTube guys.
Re: Ask HN: How would you save Yahoo and bring it back to top place ?
#6Michael Dell should make a public statement about how they should shut it down and return the money to share holders as a good luck charm. I fear in this case it'd be the right thing.
Re: Ask HN: How would you save Yahoo and bring it back to top place ?
#7Yahoo's has struck great vibe with their developer events, the Hackdays especially. And a handful of their APIs and developer related tools are too good even today. Yahoo Pipes was way ahead of it's time when it was released. YQL is one of the coolest APIs I've used. And a few others. Start offering freemium APIs. Go all out with rapid prototypes that doesn't try to do what's already there (like what they did with Yahoo Mash).
Right now their homepage seems like they just want to try and make a penny of anything from Auto to social apps to finance. Shutdown or spin off a lot of unrelated features & services that clutter their vision.
Re: Ask HN: How would you save Yahoo and bring it back to top place ?
#8man. i'd take the CEO job in a heartbeat.
So would I (although I'd prefer to do HP; I wouldn't do USPS, though). It's at least as big a challenge as building a startup.
Of course, with Yahoo, I'd probably be selling a lot of stuff and streamlining, and possibly sell the entire thing. Still, realizing shareholder value.
Being a turnaround PE guy would be awesome.
Re: Ask HN: How would you save Yahoo and bring it back to top place ?
#9Nice try, new Yahoo CEO. ;) All kidding aside, they need to focus on some core products to start stabilizing their presence again. Give Flickr good leadership. Make Delicious a priority product. Figure out if the search product is worth maintaining. Above all, they need someone scrappy and clever to lead, not just contain the flailing of their tentacles.
Their search is outsourced now to Bing, as far as I know anyway, so they can't really build around outsourced search.
Re: Ask HN: How would you save Yahoo and bring it back to top place ?
#10There's a scene I really like in The Wire in which one of the major drug kingpins realizes that his product (heroin in this case) was inferior and expensive compared to the other stuff on the market, so he asks his community college professor what to do.
Rebrand it.
If they want to survive they need to hire a bunch of really, really great designers and consolidate their properties so that it looks nice, because their homepage looks like a screencap from 10 years ago. Allow people to assemble their home pages like iGoogle. Better integrate Delicious and Flickr into their other properties. Partner with Facebook to add a social component. Decide what they stand for it and make it contrast with Google. Maybe privacy. Then make that the drumbeat of everything they do.