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Comment by omouse | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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