I spent a few years as a management consultant. Consultants are almost never hired to provide truly objective analysis. In most cases, they're hired to "back-up the viewpoint of a given executive". This is done by the executive to hedge the political risk required to go through with their action. They can point to McK when they defend their strategy to the board and then throw them under the bus if things don't pan o…
I wonder why if this is the case that someone hasn’t tried to create a “discount” management consulting service which aims to give management cover, but without all the first class travel and high living. It can’t cost that much to put together a flashy powerpoint presentation.
The high cost is part of the service. "We spared no expense planning this failed initiative and hired the best consultants. What more could we have done?"
It would be worthwhile to read Paul Graham's essay now, if you haven't already done so: "what happened to Yahoo"[1]
The thing that jumps out at me is the lack of "hacker" culture at Yahoo. Sure, they have a few really smart people there; but the culture is missing. As long as this is the case, Yahoo will continue to wander aimlessly.
Marissa (or the next CEO) would do well to work on putting together a hacker culture, and get rid of most of the PMs, Directors and VPs. Yahoo is too management-heavy, and hacker-light.
I spent a few years as a management consultant. Consultants are almost never hired to provide truly objective analysis. In most cases, they're hired to "back-up the viewpoint of a given executive". This is done by the executive to hedge the political risk required to go through with their action. They can point to McK when they defend their strategy to the board and then throw them under the bus if things don't pan o…
I wonder why if this is the case that someone hasn’t tried to create a “discount” management consulting service which aims to give management cover, but without all the first class travel and high living. It can’t cost that much to put together a flashy powerpoint presentation.
Prestige is part of what you're paying for, though.
You need to own and exploit a monopoly in order to grow into a true tech heavyweight. Facebook has social (and all the traffic and user data that comes with it), Microsoft has the OS and utilities, Apple has the OS, hardware, and apps, and Google has search and (tbd) Android apps. Unless you monopolize something of extreme value (user data or a platform), you should focus on just making money, although unfortunately…
I think you're missing the forest from the trees. Monopolies in software are created through excellence. If Facebook "has social" that's because they were and still are the best social network. Of course, now that they are big, they've got a huge lock-in effect, but that's besides the point. Microsoft "has the OS" (and I might add Office) because Windows really has been the best general purpose, generally available O…
No doubt you need to be excellent to create a monopoly (maintenance mode is much easier). But you also need the ingredients for it to exist in the first place (network effect, high value/exclusive/monetize-able data, high competitive barriers). Did Yahoo ever have a market like that, except with search early on? (They might have been able to do something interesting with messaging or mail early on to lock in those users, but they didn't.) They had a lot of eyeballs, a lot of ad salespeople, a lot of ad dollars, (later) a lot of ad network tech, a lot of great content, a lot of great niche sites (flickr). But nothing that competitors couldn't enter and replicate fairly quickly. If you were Yahoo today, and you could execute flawlessly on a single area of your current business or something closely adjacent to one of your current businesses (excluding search, which they continue to exit), what would you pick?
Definitely. Everyone who is there now and especially rose through the ranks at some point stood behind and toed the line that brought them to that point ("Cheered for more desktop ads, agreed and liked the 'Mavens' metric"). Now they'd face a significant cognitive dissonance if they did an about face and said "Yap that was stupid, what were we thinking!?". It just doesn't happen. It can only happen with new people, s…
Unless Jerry Yang wants to and can pull a Steve Jobs...
Jerry Yang already pulled a Steve Jobs with his Alibaba investment. He just never gets the credit for it.
Daily fantasy has very annoying pop up on Yahoo! Sports. Also, I guess daily fantasy product resulted in killing of NCAAF and NFL picks against Yahoo! Experts and Yahoo! Users. The Picks link goes to message "something went wrong, we are working on it" page now for several weeks. Instead it Should be 404 and Picks link removed.
don't know why this is broken, but I'll file a bug. thank you! One of these days, I'm going to run a bot that crawls all pages on yahoo.com and reports non-200 responses...
Shouldn't the yahoo.com servers already log when they return error responses? :)
Yahoo started as a couple of people who said "This internet thing has a lot of content now, let's try to organize it for people." They should go back to doing that, and throw 20 years worth of technology and cultural growth at the problem. Along with as much manpower and machine learning tech as hundreds of millions of dollars can buy. I do enjoy the drama of the Mayer Saga, but it doesn't seem like any of Yahoo's at…
If Yahoo cares about search, they should acquire DuckDuckGo. Both search engines use Bing on the backend, but the scrappy team at DuckDuckGo has built a much smarter search experience and UI than the entire Yahoo search team. What would be a fair valuation of DuckDuckGo?
I think a good idea would be to host an innovation challenge. They are already bringing in outside consultants from McKinsey, but in this day and age, how about turning to the crowd for help? If they posted significant cash prices (say $1m total) and let their users vote on the best ideas, I bet they could find some fresh directions. Also bet it would cost a fraction of what they pay McKinsey. Edit: In fact, why stop…
> They are already bringing in outside consultants from McKinsey, but in this day and age, how about turning to the crowd for help? If they posted significant cash prices (say $1m total) and let their users vote on the best ideas, I bet they could find some fresh directions. It would be fun to watch, but the markets would rightly interpret it as "we have no idea what we're doing".
If I read the article right, it looks like the investors already think that :)
Seriously though, if you use enough buzz-words, like crowd-sourced virtual incubator, or Kickstarter for Innovation, or whatever, I'm sure you could sell the idea to all the stakeholders somehow.
The OP says "Fortune 5". The candidates are Walmart, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Berkshire Hathaway, and Apple. Which one of those has super bowl ads and uses Akamai? There's your answer.
and the commenter also says in another thread: "I run an entire data center of Slackware Linux on Dell servers." so, definitely not apple. which leads me to think all that is BS and they just have too much time on their hands.
Apple using Slackware on Dells would be such a shocker?