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Dear Yahoo, hire me as your next CEO

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Re: Dear Yahoo, hire me as your next CEO

#41

Post by jvandenbroeck »

jmathai wrote: post #35
true_religion wrote: post #11

Yahoo's past notable problems which are usually mentioend are that they had competiting divisions of the same company. They had Geocities and Yahoo webhosting. They had Flickr and Yahoo Photos. --- Their current problem is poor execution. They've wanted to go into social media for a long time, and failed in many efforts. Years ago Yahoo Profiles existed with explicit tie in with Yahoo Messenger. Then Facebook came on…

I worked on Profiles and Pulse so here are some answers. 1. Roadmaps. It wasn't high on Flickr's roadmap. Profiles integration provided little to no value to them. Plus the way Yahoo! works it would have taken months just to figure out what an "integration" meant. It was talked about (several times). 2. Probably similar reasons as above. This wasn't really talked about. Delicious was kind of a red headed step child i…

Idd, sad, it looks like Yahoo is working like a bureaucratic internet company from xx years ago. They could do so much amazing things.

Re: Dear Yahoo, hire me as your next CEO

#44

Post by damncabbage »

jmathai wrote: post #39
true_religion wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YQL goes a little way in this direction, but I think all yahoo products should have a public API. Then we can have mashups created by the public, and then Yahoo can pick and choose.

I always said that YQL is the most underutilized technology at Yahoo! (internally and externally). It has/had the potential to do what it claimed, select * from internet;.

It's great, but I don't want to build anything that relies on it in case they suddenly pull a Y! BOSS on it, or just shut it off completely. It is good for prototyping, though.

(There's always a risk when integrating with third-party services, but Yahoo! seems is a bit too shaky and capricious for my liking.)

Re: Dear Yahoo, hire me as your next CEO

#45

Post by mgkimsal »

kprobst wrote: post #36

Looks like this guy is looking for a job at Yahoo and decided to augment his resume with this in hopes of impressing someone over there. Doesn't look like he's even remotely qualified to be CEO of a startup, let alone a $20B publicly traded corporation. Never mind the 'strategy' he outlines, which sounds like something out of a Starbucks brainstorming session.

I know Joe (well, knew, we haven't talked in a few years), but he's a great hustler (in the best sense of the word). Frankly, Yahoo needs someone who doesn't have experience running a $20B company. All the CEOs since Yang have run the company in to the ground.

Key among Yahoo's bad decisions: let's abandon search and become a 'media' company (based on 30 year old concepts of 'media' from a 'media' insider, all of which were rapidly becoming obsolete even 10 years ago).

Failing to get the internal groups to cooperate. Yes, it's hard. So what? That's what a CEO's job should be - do the hard stuff. The example about "well, integration wasn't on Flickr's roadmap'. Probably 110% true, but so what? Yahoo bought Flickr. Flickr's roadmap should have been Yahoo's roadmap, and Yahoo needed a coherent roadmap.

It's been so disheartening to see Yahoo move from an innovative company to "the place companies get acquired then die at".

Yahoo needs someone like Joe far more than it needs another Silicon Valley "insider board member" type. Yahoo's had a decade plus of "business types" who were going to "turn things around" and all that typical business BS. It's time for a real change. Not saying Joe specifically, but they need an outsider. I fear the shareholders are just too timid to demand real change.

The only place I'd disagree with Joe on in his list is the '100% autonomy' bits. It's the "100% autonomy" which got Yahoo in to problems, with no department being forced to integrate with another. I suspect with the right people in place, "100% autonomous decisions" may still mesh nicely with a focus on across the board integrated experiences, but I'd still want that to be a priority.

Re: Dear Yahoo, hire me as your next CEO

#46

Post by jmathai »

damncabbage wrote: post #44
jmathai wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always said that YQL is the most underutilized technology at Yahoo! (internally and externally). It has/had the potential to do what it claimed, select * from internet;.

It's great, but I don't want to build anything that relies on it in case they suddenly pull a Y! BOSS on it, or just shut it off completely. It is good for prototyping, though. (There's always a risk when integrating with third-party services, but Yahoo! seems is a bit too shaky and capricious for my liking.)

Agreed. My statements assumed a Yahoo! which wasn't optimizing itself to shut down services.

Re: Dear Yahoo, hire me as your next CEO

#47

Post by scrame »

> I’d buy the NYT (for a mere $1.5bn!) and recruit John Gruber to be Editor in Chief of the “Yahoo! News” division.

Are you kidding? I get Gruber is a popular blogger in some circles, but in what way does he have the kind of insight, ability, or experience needed to run the new york times and yahoo news?

Re: Dear Yahoo, hire me as your next CEO

#48

Post by agotterer »

pitdesi wrote: post #14
quellhorst wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yahoo's stock is worth 20 billion. You can acquire companies for stock and cash. When a company is public, you can acquire more easily in exchange for stock. Mark Cuban became a billionaire from his Yahoo stock he got from the acquisition of broadcast.com.

Yahoo's stock is worth 20 billion... and is mostly owned by shareholders. Yahoo can't give it to someone else, because people like me own it. Edit: Suking is right, they could issue new shares... IF people actually wanted Yahoo shares and a target company would actually accept them. (would not happen)

Not mention even if they had the $20B to buy all those companies. You now have a portfolio of companies that really don't make much/any money. Those smart people aren't going to work for free!

Re: Dear Yahoo, hire me as your next CEO

#49

Post by CoffeeDregs »

Hmm... I understand the post's point, but it starts off so flawed that it's difficult to take any of it seriously. Yahoo does not have a super-duper market cap; Alibaba does and Yahoo owns 40% of Alibaba [1]; Yahoo certainly isn't a small company, but it's more like a unhealthy, unhappy, declining $6B company.

Big companies have big company issues because managing huge groups of people is a complex process. I like startups and bloggers as much as the next g(uy|al), but startups are not wonderful tonics that larger companies can buy to cure their ailments. One of the exact reasons lots of folks like startups is that we can avoid those issues. The post suggests that you can take a bunch of people who probably don't want to work in a big company, pull them in to a big company and have everything go well...

[1] http://www.quora.com/If-Yahoo-owns-40-of-Alibaba-and-thats-w...

Re: Dear Yahoo, hire me as your next CEO

#50

Post by yuhong »

mgkimsal wrote: post #45
kprobst wrote: post #36

Looks like this guy is looking for a job at Yahoo and decided to augment his resume with this in hopes of impressing someone over there. Doesn't look like he's even remotely qualified to be CEO of a startup, let alone a $20B publicly traded corporation. Never mind the 'strategy' he outlines, which sounds like something out of a Starbucks brainstorming session.

I know Joe (well, knew, we haven't talked in a few years), but he's a great hustler (in the best sense of the word). Frankly, Yahoo needs someone who doesn't have experience running a $20B company. All the CEOs since Yang have run the company in to the ground. Key among Yahoo's bad decisions: let's abandon search and become a 'media' company (based on 30 year old concepts of 'media' from a 'media' insider, all of whi…

I know. Microsoft and the DOJ certainly didn't help. Neither did Carl Icann.
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