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NYT on Terry Semel of Yahoo!

Posted by Zonk on from the another-big-thinker dept.

prostoalex writes "With the recent CEO smackdown and Steve Jobs profiled by BusinessWeek, The New York Times talks about yet another high-tech CEO - Terry Semel of Yahoo! An outsider to the industry, Terry Semel currently leads the global company with the broadest reach. NYT looks into Yahoo!'s most valuable assets - technology produced by its employees, and covers many Yahoo! products, some of which, like Yahoo! Search, launched 2 years ago, trail only Google in the amount of users."

3 of 33 comments (clear)

  1. I just finished reading Rules for Revolutionaries by pHatidic · · Score: 4, Funny

    The commute is too far. And there isn't any money to be made off this search thing. -Guy Kawasaki, when asked to interview for CEO of Yahoo! (Guy wrote Rules for Revolutionaries)

  2. Yahoo!'s most valuable assets it's technology? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting
    The reality of it is that Yahoo! is first and foremost a media company. It's most valuable assets is its traffic and it's large reach. Whether that reach is maintained by churning out new services, or by making more original or exclusive content available has no bearing on the business - the editorial/content teams and corp. dev. teams who work on securing more content deals are as valuable as the engineering team.

    That's what sets Yahoo! apart from Google, for instance. Google is a technology company. Yahoo! is a media company. Big difference. Yahoo could, if it wanted, live off licensing all the technology it needs from third parties. Google can't. For Yahoo! engineering is a luxury - Yahoo! maintains it because it makes things easier, cheaper and helps the company keep control of its destiny. For Google it is a necessity - it's audience is tied almost exclusively to its technology assets.

    The most visible result of this comes in approach to new services: Yahoo! favours incremental improvement driven by business needs (competition, customer expectations) of proven services, and is prepared to wait for another company to test the waters before going full steam ahead, while Google throws out new services and features to see if they'll stick, and takes the cost of failures (Orkut etc.) much like Yahoo! used to five years ago.

    Gmail is a good example. Google went full speed ahead and threw a bombshell (not with the features - normal users tends to find Gmail feature limited and confusing - the disk space is what mattered) into the mail market. Yahoo! (and the rest) followed up with smaller increases. End result? Yahoo! still makes money selling what Google gives away for free (2GB+ storage space), and Gmail ended up making only tiny inroads into the mail market, barely denting the large providers like Yahoo!, Hotmail and AOL.

    More importantly, Google was left with their silly "permanently increasing" quotas, while the rest of the market for the most part kept their userbase (except, to a large extent, the people who cost them the most by keeping as much as they could stored in their accounts...) and their revenue streams.

    Google failed to realise that "unlimited" storage is a technology driven feature, not a user demand. It means little to most people outside the geek crowd.

    This is also behind the often denigrated cluttered Yahoo! home page (though people here also forget that Yahoo! search has it's own homepage just as most other Yahoo services) - the Yahoo! home page is delivering a huge amount of traffic to a vast amount of Yahoo! content pages and services. Search is just one of many resources users go to that page for. People come there because it provides the mix of content they want, just like a newspaper or magazine people grow familiar with.

    As a result it is also driving a huge amount of revenue.

    The important point of this is that if Yahoo! falls behind technology wise in a particular area, it won't matter too much - Yahoo! has many legs to stand on. If Google falls behind in search technology, it is more or less dead.

    It's different strategies - "slow" audience growth and embracing anything that will grow your reach and audience numbers (Yahoo) vs. driving traffic via technological superiority in a few basic areas (Google).

    Only time will tell what gives the best long term viability.

    (Disclaimer: I'm an ex-Yahoo employee)

  3. Exclamation Point! by OctoberSky · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The smartest thing Yahoo! ever did was add that Eclamation Point to their name. No matter what the story, be it good, bad, neutral, even boring that little bugger makes them stand out.

    I always read headlines and stories and forget that they have it attached in their copyrights. I was all giddy to read a story about a CEO, not because I am a business major or a fan of Yahoo! in general, but because that little mark (!) envokes so much emotion!
    You can't just go around throwing exlamation points at every crappy sentance, but Yahoo! makes every crappy story about them stand out!