Ask Slashdot: Can Yahoo Actually Stage a Comeback?

Nerval's Lobster writes "Fresh off purchasing Tumblr for $1.1 billion, Yahoo has moved to the next stage of what's becoming a company-wide reboot: fixing Flickr, the photo-sharing service that it acquired in 2005 and subsequently allowed to languish. Yahoo boosted Flickr accounts' individual storage capacity to one free terabyte, revamped the Website's overall look, and launched a new Flickr app for Google Android, among other tweaks. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer clearly wants her company to fight toe-to-toe on features with Google and Facebook, but she faces a long road ahead of her: not only does she need to streamline Yahoo's cumbersome corporate structure and product portfolio into something that resembles fighting shape, but she needs to reverse the general perception that Yahoo is teetering on the edge of history's trash-bin, with an aging customer base and unexciting features. The question is, could anyone actually pull it off? Is Yahoo capable of an Apple-style turnaround, or are its current actions merely delaying the inevitable?"

Comments

Of course

[MrEricSir]

Yahoo *could* stage a comeback, but why? What makes a product or service from Yahoo unique?

Can't answer that question? Of course not. Yahoo is a holding company made up of numerous acquisitions. If there's an identity buried in there somewhere, it's a Frankenstein's monster, stitched together out of spare parts. There's nothing cohesive about Yahoo, nothing that makes it special as a company, and there never was.

Re:Of course

[longk]

IMHO that's just her way of waking everybody up and making it clear this boat is changing its course. With time, I'm sure people will be working remotely once again.

Re:Of course

[Grishnakh]

Because she's a female. If she were a man, we could call him an "overrated bozo". You wouldn't call a woman a "bozo", since that's a reference to Bozo the Clown, who was a man.

Re:Of course

[Anonymous Coward]

I was employed with Yahoo when they made the WFH change. We were lied to even within the company. It was initially communicated permanent WFH employees would no longer be able to WFH to help drive innovation. 160-something permanent WFH people out of ~16,000 employees were suppose to make a HUGE impact on innovation?? It became clear shortly after the announcement that it was BS. The real reason was communicated a few days later. They made the decision after looking at the VPN logs and saw people WFH weren't even logging in. Not necessarily the permanent WFH people, just in general. It wasn't a stealth layoff, it was a get people to actually do their work.

Do I think Yahoo will make a comeback? Absolutely not. There is way too much dysfunction in that company to fix.

Re:How quickly can they de-crap their products?

[tompaulco]

Look at gmail. Clean. Simple. Functional.

Well, with g-mails latest changes (admittedly a year old now), the question in my mind is whether yahoo can maintain status quo long enough for Google to shoot themselves in the foot by making their product more crappy.

Re:Can Apple Actually Stage a Comeback?

[Grishnakh]

There's always an exception somewhere. Steve Jobs, love him or hate him, was a uniquely talented individual, and if Apple hadn't brought him back the way they did, they would indeed have died years ago. I seriously doubt this Marissa Mayer is this sort of uniquely talented person. Moreover, Apple has always had a bit of a cult around it due to the qualities of its products (remember, their whole goal was to make computers that regular people could use for work and everyday tasks, hence their extreme focus on UI and UX from way back when Jobs toured PARC). Yahoo doesn't have anything like this; its whole claim to fame was that it was a web portal back in the days before Google and search engines; essentially it started out as a giant web directory. This whole concept is totally obsolete now, so they tried to pitch themselves as a "front page" to the internet, but not many people care about that any more.

The only way I see them surviving is if they use the cash they still have and re-invent themselves into something different, mostly abandoning this "web portal" crap. I have no idea what that would be, however, and since really revolutionary ideas (like Facebook, Twitter, etc.) never come from large, established corporations, but rather from tiny start-ups, I think their days are very numbered.

No.

[Lumpy]

Not with the complete Moron CEO they have. That woman has no idea how to run a business. You do NOT insult your customers to gain market share...

Her Comments , “There’s no such thing as Flickr Pro today because [with so many people taking photographs] there’s really no such thing as professional photographers anymore...”

I really hope someone told her that she was a complete idiot for saying those words at a press conference.

What would they come back to?

[AdamHaun]

Apple started off making computers (or maybe "integrated hardware/software experiences" is a better way to put it). After their comeback, they still made computers. Now their big thing is portable computers -- a big change, but still related to what they always did. Their focus is on design and UX expertise.

Yahoo started off making a hierarchical directory of web sites, then dove into the web portal craze of the late 1990s. After their comeback, they will ___________. Their focus is on ___________.

Fill in the blanks. It's not going to be what they did before, because nobody wants more hierarchical web directories and portals. They have a bunch of people still using their webmail, so that's one option. GMail wiped the floor with them before, but it's been getting clunky lately thanks to G+. Yahoo could try to recapture the clean simplicity of Google's early days. That would be a big challenge indeed -- as a portal company, the idea of leaving blank space on a web page is utterly alien to them.

It looks like they're producing independent news. That's an interesting option -- they could compete with the Huffington Post et al. Online news is still based strongly on newspapers, so there's room for someone to shake up the format.

This all seems like a stretch, though. Yahoo's name has little value, and their current expertise isn't very helpful. All they bring to the table is more money than a startup, but it probably won't be enough to save them. Then again, that's what I said about Apple too.

Re:YAHOO! ??

[Spy Handler]

i used it all the time. It used to have a human-submitted and maintained tree directory of the internet.

Think about that for a second.

So if I wanted to find a good website about DOS games, instead of googling for "DOS Games", I would go to Yahoo and select a top category. It might be "Entertainment".

And find subcategories, such as Games -> Computer Games -> Legacy Games -> DOS

And look through the listings.

Re:How quickly can they de-crap their products?

[ADRA]

Dude, Firefox has worked as well as it always has. Just because its not your cup of tea doesn't make it crappy. One could say the same about IE if you really liked the product differentiation(I'd never, but I can understand the argument) then who am I to say differently.

Should we all go out and use Unity, Gnome3, Windows8 just because its new and shiny? No. We use what works for us, and if you don't like it then at least keep the smug to yourself.