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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.'"
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).
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..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.