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.'"

Comments

This is not news

[The Clockwork Troll]

Yahoo! has been investing broadly and shallowly for its entire existence.

Yahoo!'s strategy has ALWAYS been to develop JUST enough of a presence in any given vertical market that some fraction of its 300 million users will wander over to the sites from the Yahoo! home page or their Yahoo! Mail account, to justify its existence.

If Yahoo! has ever invested deeply in any area, you can be damn sure it was because some C-level employee or SVP decided to make it their personal crusade, not because it was standard operating procedure actually to follow through on making great products.

Sadly it seems Google (which also needs as much distribution for its ads as it can get) is going down this path as well, but they're better at making splashes here and there, and they are fortunate enough to be enjoying the kind of consumer goodwill that Yahoo! had in its heyday so folks aren't jaded with this not-so-novel approach yet.