What Yahoo Should Do | Hacker News Reader

What Yahoo Should Do

blogmaverick.com

31 pointsterpua16 comments

I don't think that's a good idea. Yahoo has a problem that it's divisions seem to be too diverse and unintegrated. Buying even more will lead to a further lack of focus. Purchasing several web 2.0 apps will lead to a fragmentation in the attention span of the people managing these properties. You also need to allocate engineers to develop each item.

What Yahoo should do is own several large sites, and monetize them across a single integrated brand per site. For example, flickr and the Yahoo portal are two large brands.

Yahoo already has content and search properties. They would do well to focus laser-sharp on how to properly monetize them.

You can speak to any advertiser who has used both Yahoo's and Google's ad management systems. Yahoo's is awkward and unreliable to the point of uselessness and many advertisers have completely abandoned Yahoo until that company gets purchased by someone who knows how to do the job right.

We're not asking much, Yahoo: Just provide an ad-management system which is as good as Google's was five years ago.

I just spent my afternoon adding a boatload of targeted search advertising to Google for a new campaign. I'd would have happily shoveled some of that cash Yahoo's way, but it would be a complete waste of time and money to do that today.

I was going to make a clever joke about his use of uppercase S in "Microsoft" but I couldn't think of one.

Probably because he's used to type the name of his old company MicroSolutions.

I guess once you make enough money you can capitalize however you want. Like Jerry Yang sending all-lowercase emails.

Maybe it's an unconscious slip about his MicroSoft member.

How do I downvote with no down arrow?

Real mature.

Or it's intentional and he's commenting on how they've been too soft in the marketplace these last few years.

Its original name was "Micro-Soft", IIRC. Maybe Mark has just been around long enough to remember when the capital "S" was correct. (In his defense, he does get the lower-case "b" right in "Facebook", which many people capitalize erroneously.)

This is reaching at best. To quote Peter Lynch, I don't think "de-worsification" is a viable strategy for Yahoo.

I think he brings up a very good point about acquisitions and yahoo. However, many questions need to be answered before yahoo can move forward with any sort of acquisition based strategy. Does yahoo have the cash to buy up relevant companies that will help them in the long run? Will these companies even want yahoo stock if offered? What does yahoo's board think about this?

Right now it seems that yahoo is dealing with the fallout from all those layoffs and finding a new CEO. As good a strategy as it might be, I don't see yahoo rapidly acquiring companies right now or even in the near future.

Why isn't this post appearing at the top of his blogmaverick homepage?

oh jesus between allthingsD, valleywag, blodget and blogmaverick, they've saved yahoo twenty times in the last month in various blog posts. give it up folks, google won. but if its still an obsession, round up some of the thousands of former y's around the bay area and just build the company you keep blogging about building.

Well, speaking of obsessions, I'm puzzled as to why people are so obsessed with the idea that Yahoo and Google can not co-exist. Why does it have to be "google won", "yahoo lost" and because yahoo yahoo did not "win" they have "failed"?

Yahoo is wildly successful by a tonne of metrics, and yet they seem to be widely perceived as failures. This is something I don't understand.

Best I can explain it is that the tech savvy digerati have moved on from Yahoo personally and are unable to perceive that in the mainstream, Yahoo is widely used and liked.

if only Yahoo! would really embrace its people powered roots, nowadays evident in Flickr and del.icio.us, and keep these sites independent and geeky, and useful to feed bottom-up information and content into Yahoo! (remember? it was a directory 15 years ago), and accept the fact that most of the users of Yahoo! proper are not super technologically savvy anymore, and create a simple portal by the people and for the people, and never be afraid of being too "low" by appealing to normal people's fascination with, well, other people, famous people, singers, movies, sports, gossip etc.

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