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Comment by ethank | Hacker News Reader

Yahoo needs someone who can clearly articulate what Yahoo does. There is no "product" to draft behind, just a disjointed set of technologies which individually are great (as someone pointed out, YUI and Hadoop, etc), but holistically don't have any focus.

Google had the same problem, but they are now shedding this.

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In my 8.5 years working there, the "mission" of Yahoo that I came away with is to try to be everything to everyone--poorly.

Reminds me of my first meeting at Yahoo after I started at WBR.

I was a huge fan of delicious pre-acquisition and wanted to meet with Joshua to see if there was any way to tie music and our artist sites in with the service. I e-mailed him I think to setup a meeting.

We show up and our meeting is in the very, very back of the office in a conference room. Josh is there as well as a guy is his boss and another guy.

We find out this is the first time Josh had ever met his boss (this is about four months post acquisition) and the other guy didn't know why he was there, but the meeting had showed up on his calendar.

It was singularly awkward.

I used Yahoo back when it was still on the stanford.edu servers and called "David and Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web"

I social engineered my way into the old wooden building when making a documentary on how people in the service sector were dealing with the "information super highway" in 1999 during a conference.

A lot of great people and great technology went into that company and came out of that company. I hope for at least legacies sake someone can figure out how to turn it around. The misguidedness is not new however, and I have lots and lots of stories from the last five years of dealing with them.

(Joshua)

I remember that meeting! I think it was actually the latest in a series of bungee-bosses.

Google didn't have a product? When?

So how is Yahoo still number 4 in ranking (according to Alexa).. Honest question - what drives so much traffic? Search?

I think yahoo mail. The feature diff between yahoo mail and gmail is not big enough to justify the switching cost for many people (lost archives, old friends and contacts need to be informed of email change)

In fact Yahoo mail has more subscribers than Gmail. Hotmail is the biggest among the three.

Yahoo produces a ton of content. I believe their Finance and Sports sites are #1. Autos is huge. Their news site is big. Their front page gets massive traffic. They have a ton of other sites as well. And this isn't spammy content farming. They really do have a ton of original as well as quality licensed content (e.g. AP stories). They do extremely well in the realm of content, and with audience engagement around that content. Add in Yahoo Mail, Personals, Answers (ugh), etc. They have a lot of very successful sites.

Yahoo Sports is an excellent sports journalism outlet and probably the only serious competitor to the ESPN monopoly. They broke the story on the Miami recruiting scandal, one of the largest NCAA violations in history, after doing extensive in-depth research.

Non-tech users love the homepage, along with the other stuff mentioned here (sports, classifieds).

The yahoo frontpage is still the starting destination for a large number of people. Without trying to draw conclusions about why people just like to use the frontpage as a jumping of place.

Why not ask the employees who actually WORK on their products what the heck Yahoo's vision for the future should be? Crowdsource the company vision so you don't have to rely on someone like Steve Jobs magically appearing out of nowhere.

They do. There are numerous attempts internally at Yahoo to solicit feedback. I don't think they listen. Besides that people see such a sliver of what yahoo does overall that individual feedback like that can often be unhelpful at a corporate level.

A year or so ago, there was a survey done (we had such surveys every quarter) which asked the employees how much confidence they had in the top-level management.

The answer? Only 11% said they had confidence.

This is what our manager told us. She was so disgusted she didn't even share the summary that she was supposed to.

After that, they stopped the surveys. It's easier to kill the messenger, I guess.

Crowdsourced vision seems like a PR-approved term for design by committee. I don't see that being an improvement.

Everyone has an opinion of what Yahoo should do, the union of which is the entire spectrum of possibilities. Perhaps this is even the cause of the downfall of Yahoo, as its vision seems to be to do most everything others have already done, but poorly. It takes a true visionary to see through the vast majority of these so-called potentials, say no to short-sighted revenue temptations, and make painful decisions. You simply can't crowd-source a Steve Jobs.

Clearly Joe Stump is ready to step in if need be. His article is down right now, probably to many people trying to see if they offered him the job, but here is the google cache.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:TgPIGZf...

If I was still working at Yahoo I would be stoked to have this guy as my boss.

Except even if you managed to acquire all those companies, all their key leaders would leave Yahoo in a year to do their own thing.

I mean, do you really think the New York Times staff wants to work for Yahoo! News? Or that Jack Dorsey wants to work for Yahoo! Mobile?

Yahoo can't buy their way out of this mess, IMHO.

Yea, but if you buy all the companies. They couldn't leave in one year because they would need to earn out there shares.

Identifying talent is not a substitute for actual vision. Buzz does an excellent job of making that point here:

http://log.scifihifi.com/post/6891792369/i-would-like-to-ann...

I don't know about that. Aol bought techcrunch and let them go hog wild, that ended up okay.

Ermm.. I'm assuming that comment is the beef jerky of humour: Very dry! In that case, haha! If not, then I suggest you check out the latest developments with AOL/TC.

Ah, yes. The guy who doesn't understand the difference between market cap and cash on hand. It'd be awesome to have him as your boss, so you could witness first hand what it looks like when incompetent leadership takes a company from $12.50 per share to $0.

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