Yahoo Shakes Things Up

PreacherTom writes "Growing strife inside Yahoo! has erupted into a sweeping management and organizational shakeup. CEO Terry Semel announced yesterday that the company will be reordered into three groups: one to focus on advertisers and publishers, another to focus on Yahoo!'s base of over 500 million users, and a third on technology and development. While Semel denies layoffs are in the future, there will be replacements in the upper echelon for the world's most popular website. The changes, the most extensive at Yahoo in more than five years, cap months of speculation about how it would respond to slowing sales growth, a slumping stock price, and a steady stream of executive departures in the past year."

Comments

Yahoo is in trouble

[filenavigator]

I think Yahoo has been coasting for years. If my website logs are a reflection of their popularity they are in big trouble. Google beats them at a rate of 100 to 1. On top of that their version of 'adwords' is the worst I have seen (From an ad buyer's perspective). It takes days for them to approve the ad (Google takes minutes) Then when they do approve it they change the wording - usually done by a non native English speaker! I have had my software adverts changed to include the word warez. WAREZ! They need to clean house or they will need to fire more until they do.

Steve Wiseman
http://www.windows-admin-tools.com

Re:Yahoo is in trouble

[eln]

You're right that Yahoo is in trouble, but this looks like a panic move that won't really change much. They don't know what to do, they only know something drastic has to be done. So, they throw out the executives they don't like, and shuffle the others around. As each executive takes over their new role, they will have massive layoffs in order to "streamline" the business, but they still won't really know what that business is.

Yahoo has spent too much time accumulating services that are not "best of breed" by any means, but are simply reactions to the offerings of others. They don't even really know what kind of company they want to be, or even what business they're in (other than "the web"), and until they figure that out, they're going to continue to flail madly while they spiral down the drain.

Re:Yahoo is in trouble

[Anonymous Coward]

I clicked all around your site, and I couldn't find the warez. No cracked Vista, no Photoshop ISOs, nothing! I'm severely disappointed, and I'm suing you for false advertising.

Re:Yahoo is in trouble

[badasscat]

If my website logs are a reflection of their popularity they are in big trouble. Google beats them at a rate of 100 to 1.

Yahoo is a lot more than just search. Google is too, but the point is your web site results are not reflective of Yahoo's business as a whole. While they do want a bigger piece of the search advertising pie, I don't think even they really consider search their core business anymore. (It never really was to begin with; they were always more of a directory than a search company, though they've tried to change that in recent years.)

All you need to do is go to Yahoo's web site and then go to Google's web site to see their different business models.

Just for one example, though, I bought my house through Yahoo Real Estate, which partnered with Prudential in my area to give local online real estate listings. Google has no such thing (even though with Google Maps, it would seem a natural fit). Yahoo has many facets like this that you probably don't even realize.

In related news...

[denebian devil]

In related news, Yahoo also makes sweeping changes to their site design, leading to buggy site behavior, slower load times, and general unrest among Yahoo's populace.

What do you expect?

[Dareth]

I mean this is the one company you know for a fact is run by a bunch of "Yahoos"!

The problem with going public

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Beholden to its investors, Yahoo can't push through hard times with grit and wisdom. It must bow to its ever-fluctuating market value and carve itself into living and dead tissue like a wolf caught in a trap. To emerge from a downturn is to have rent itself into a skeleton of its original physique, and the remaining body is less able to handle the next downturn, especially as those dips never stop coming for a flailing company.

In private hands the company leaders may be indulged to take risks that a public company would never be allowed to contemplate. Jerry Yang sits quietly in his house thankful for getting on the train early, but the company itself dies slowly as its blood gushes into the heads of other Silicon Valley firms.

Here's an idea

[SNR monkey]

Maybe they should relaunch their website as Houyhnhnm.com. I am sure it would be much more peaceful and rational than a company run by a bunch of yahoos.

Yahoo Spread Itself Thin

[organgtool]

The problem is that they try to offer too many services and can't dedicate enough resources to keep those features growing. Therefore, other companies who focus on one only service that competes with Yahoo can do a better job of catering to their users. I have used several of Yahoo's services for a few years and I have watched competing services expand to provide more features than Yahoo. It's not that Yahoo's services are bad - their competitors are simply growing faster since they only focus on one service.

Oddly enough, I have found Yahoo's search to be more accurate than Google for certain topics. Google has always been great when doing narrow searches and it used to be pretty good at wide searches too, but lately I have been finding that I need to go through several pages to find what I am looking for on a wide Google search. I got fed up with this, so I tried Yahoo search and I was pleasantly surprised. Yahoo seems to consistently provide the results I look for within the first few entries. I'm not saying that Yahoo search is better than Google, but it seems like Google doesn't appear to be the magic bullet that it used to be.

Re:TV Listings

[Bill Dimm]

Yeah, and they've gotten tons of feedback on it in their own blog. I gave up on them and switched to AOL TV too. I've never used AOL for anything before. Go figure.

Re:Would you please...

[SNR monkey]

Sure I hope that helps. I wasn't sure how the reference would go over.

Three envelopes

[rlp]

A new CEO is starting work. He walks into his new office, and the old CEO that he's replacing is packing up his stuff. The former CEO wishes his successor well and hands him three numbered envelopes which contain the solutions to any serious management problems.

After about six months, the stock slumps. The new CEO opens the first envelope. It says "Blame your predecessor". He holds a press conference and confidence in the company is restored.

Another six months pass and another crisis arises. He opens the second envelope. It says "Reorganize the company". He does so and the crisis passes.

After a year, things are terrible. The stock price is in a downward spiral. The CEO opens the third envelope. It says "Go get three envelopes ...".

Re:TV Listings

[roaddemon]

Ditto, I absolutely can't believe that got released to production. I've been using tv.yahoo.com for years now and had to switch when they "upgraded". It seems that they are throwing changes at the wall now just to see what will stick.

Re:*Cough* Bullh!t *Cough*

[X]

right, 500 million unique users? I'm surprised they didn't claim to still be the world's most popular search engine, surely they would with those figures.

That's a real number. Yahoo actually has some fairly strict auditing process for calculating those numbers. Why doesn't this make them the most popular search engine? The reasons are many:

• Many of Yahoo's visitors are using services other than search (I believe the home page, mail, and my yahoo service all have more visitors, not to mention all the other services like chat, messenger, news, finance, personals, hot jobs, games, etc. which collectively might add up to a good chunk of those visitors.
  
• Search engine popularity tends to be measured by number of searches, rather than unique visitors. If someone uses Yahoo once for every thousand times they use Google, that hardly gives Yahoo an equivalent share to Google.
  
• Unique users is useful in an advertising context (although traffic is still pretty important even in that context), but it is a lousy measure of popularity.
  
• I believe folks who just go to the home page still count as a unique user, and that page was, up until recently, the highest traffic page on the Internet. That's a lot of unique users right there.
  

The appeal of working for Yahoo...

[coleopterana]

What is it? There's a generic appeal to working for web companies like Yahoo and Google, but there's a specific appeal to some of them, like putting out new projects, working on your interests, so on. I see Yahoo as having shared the generic appeal of those company types in the past and now they feel more second tier, both to users and to jobseekers. If you aren't appealing as more than just a job in the field, it's going to be hard to get the people that can really help you be innovative, flexible and forward-thinking, especially when you're competing with companies (like Google) that not only have that image publicly but (at least in my experience) deliver for their employees. Anyone out there working for Yahoo? What drew you to it, what keeps you there, what seems to be the type of new hire, and what draws them?

Re:The appeal of working for Yahoo...

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for Yahoo! (note the "!" :) ).

Judging the appeal of a company based on the CEO (or even the top management) is like judging the ride of a car by looking at the hood ornament.

Yahoo! is a great place to work. We may not have officially sanctioned "20% time off" policies, but there's a lot of freedom to find your own calling.

Tomorrow (Thursday) is an internal "Hack Day", and Yahoo!s all over the world will be churning out interesting/cool projects in an informal competition. It's loads of fun.

The biggest advantage of Yahoo! as an employer is that there is such a wide variety of projects to work on. You want to work on a project doing, say, TV on a mobile device? I'm sure there's a group working on that.

No Layoffs?

[hondo77]

Layoffs, which at least one Yahoo executive had called for, are not in the plans.

Yahoo! also announced that they expect to overtake Google, in both market share and profitability, later this month thanks to their new strategic partnership with Santa Claus. An expected deal with the Easter Bunny should enhance their second quarter results.