Category Archives: yahoo

Reinventing Yahoo

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Kara Swisher at the Wall Street Journal is reporting on Yahoo’s trials and tribulations as CEO Jerry Yang works to regain the glory days Yahoo enjoyed years ago when Yahoo, not Google, was the internet wonder company whose upward potential seemed to know know bounds according to many stock analysts and tech watchers.

Here’s more from PaidContent on what some seem to think is a Yahoo mini-bloodbath.

At an SES Conference lunch table I was sitting with several well connected tech watchers and warriors and asked about Yahoo’s prospects. “They are dead” said one search marketing insider, noting that Yahoo search results remain easy to spam, leading to inferior quality and search problems. Another thought Yahoo needs to become the king of videos, essentially working to become “the” online network, monetizing with extensive advertising embedded in the videos. However the concensus seemed to be that Yahoo needed to move “sideways” and simply consolidate their second place search status in the hopes of stopping the hemorraging of morale and stock price.

On balance I’m a lot more optimistic than most about Yahoo’s prospects, though I think they need to get more comfortable copying Google in several respects. Also, given Google’s accelerating dominance in the online sector it seems an MSN buyout is the most logical course for Yahoo and probably MSN as well. This would allow MSN to continue to focus on their bread and butter with Office and Vista while bringing their clever LIVE staff in line with Yahoo. Yahoo would continue much as it does now but be an MSN “brand” for online stuff while MSN would seek to connect as tightly as legally possible their offline dominance with their current online weaknesses. Despite the fact that Yahoo is the clear number two in online search, it’s currently capitalized at about 30 billion, less than 20% of Google’s massive 158 billion market cap and only about 11% of MSFT’s 265 billion market cap. Is the Yahoo online empire worth a mere *fifth* of Google’s? Sure seems to me the answer is yes. Microsoft what’s wrong with you and

Yahoo – what the HECK is wrong with YOUHoo, too?

Disclaimer: I have some Yahoo Stock. Yes, I’m still proud of that!
No, I’m not making money on it. Wake up Yahoo!

Yahoo’s Decker has a lot of fans

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This NYT Article is a helpful primer on Sue Decker and how well regarded she is in the highest of tech circles. Dinner with Bill Gates? Microsoft would be well advised to purchase Yahoo but that deal seemed to have cooled months ago after much speculation. I’m wildly guessing it remains a very strong possibility.

Update: This Yahoo Press release about the new Yahoo ads just came out today. Hard to know the impact until we see advertisers reporting some results.

Disclaimer (dat claimer, we all claimer for ice cream!): I’ve got some Yahoo stock

Yang, Yahoo, Yippee!

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This Yahoo shareholder is thrilled to see Jerry Yang back at the head of the company he and David Filo founded 12 years ago. Yahoo is a fantastic company with a huge cadre of brilliant developers that have been languishing in no small part because senior management has failed to inspire, reward, and take advantage of the amazing 2.0 stuff that has become the lifeblood of Yahoo’s development efforts for the past several years.

Google has crushed MS and handily beat Yahoo in online profits and search viewership because they 1) still have somewhat better search routines and 2) have taken simple paths and provided user friendly, simple solutions to common problems. Yang knows this and he knows how to fix it. I’m not sure Terry Semel even understood the significance of search and advertising driven computing, and probably did not grasp the significance of social computing which even Google is failing to fully grasp (but is profiting from because of their brilliant contextual matching programs so social networks can display relevant ads). Yahoo’s panama can do this as well if Yang gets *competitive* and does the smart stuff like offer publishers higher revenue shares than Google.

Bebos, billions, and why Yahoo is starting to piss me off.

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Yahoo may buy Bebo, the British “Myspace”, for a billion dollars. That is a LOT of money – about 3% of Yahoo’s market cap. Presumably this, like Yahoo’s unsuccessful Facebook aquisition attempt, is Yahoo’s approach to recapturing the market dominance it enjoyed back in the day. Dominance through the aquisition of a social network rather than developing their own.

They should know better than to trust their existing criteria for decisions about aquisitions. Yahoo is the company that aquired Overture’s pay per click technology years ago, and then managed to cede dominance in that area to Google. Ever heard of Google? Yahoo probably could have *owned* Google, but it seems higher management didn’t think search had the monetization potential of … broadcast.com which was purchased for billions.

Isn’t it time for top management at Yahoo to let innovation, not aquisitions, rule the day? This approach has worked very well for Google, who’s main mistakes now appear to be in aquiring things like YouTube which in my opinion is unlikely to recover YouTube’s 1.6 billion price tag and will certainly pester Google with big money lawsuits for decades. Yahoo’s still got a LOT of great technical people, especially in the developer and new business divisions. More importantly, the world is producing hundreds of thousands of new, brilliant innovators every year, most of whom are chomping at the bit to bring new and exciting innovation to the hungry online world. Why not devote the billions to this rather than purchasing companies with marginal revenues and long term prospects that are more hope and prayer than reality?

With the latest flurry of high priced aquistions it almost seems like, to the big players, the billion dollar deal is the new million dollar deal. I remain skeptical that deals of this size pay off in the long run – certainly very, very few of the early pre-bubble ones did not pay off for companies. I’d suggest that the smaller deals (e.g. Flickr) do have potential, but that Yahoo’s top management is looking for a killer deal that simply does exist while the innovation approach (ie much, MUCH more support to the core values and teams at Yahoo) is starting them in the face. Traffic? Yahoo’s got plenty of it. Modest changes can send millions of Yahoo users to any new idea, so why not do this *a lot more* and test *a lot more ideas*.

Edison suggested that there is always a better way, and it’s time for Yahoo to ….. find it.

More Bebo-logy from Techmeme:

Yahoo may net Bebo owners $1bn

 

 

Bebo/YHOO: My Rumor’s Bigger Than Yours

Yahoo May Be Bidding For Social Network Bebo: Report

Yahoo: When You Can’t Buy Facebook, You Buy Bebo

Bebo is not for sale


Google and Privacy

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Here is a nice post from Google about their new policy to anonymize search info from users. Like many I have been critical in the past of Google and others for storing this information with little regard to who owns it or saying what they’ll be doing with it.     Yahoo and MSN do not (yet) have similar policies so I think Google can rightly claim a higher road since they have also been the one who has fought Government attempts to nab search data.   (I have mixed feelings about that since, unlike folks like Battelle, I fear commercial abuses  more than I fear the Government will use my data in illegal and harmful ways.

Microsoft may buy Yahoo = a good idea.

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Wow, I’m liking my Yahoo stock which just jumped over $5 per share,but Microsoft couldn’t you have announced the possible bid to buy Yahoo about a month back when I had my 2000 YHOO 30 calls? With Yahoo at $33.34 I could have sold that 1000 investment for a cool $67,000!

WSJ Story (paywall)

NY Post Story

Henry Blodget thinks it’s important to spin off a new company rather than just suck Yahoo up into the borgness of Microsoft.

But hey, I do think this aquisition/merger is a good idea. Yahoo is very different from Microsoft. However, to the limited extent I interact with MS and Yahoo it seems to me that both of those corporate cultures have become bureaucratic, sluggish, and uninspired when compared to Google’s freewheeling yet very productive approaches. Yet very importantly, the people I meet from Yahoo and MS are often as impressive as those at Google, and certainly capable of great things as all these folks reinvent the online world on a regular basis.

If Microsoft can pool the innovations of the LIVE project with Yahoo’s superb developer support programs, and hire and inspire more people to have the evangelical zeal of Googlers, it could be a whole new online ballgame.

Update:  Om Malik’s reporting that WSJ’s reporting the talks appear to be off already.

Digging Copyright Infringement?

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Today’s excitement at Digg regarding posting codes to override copyright protection on HD DVDs, combined with the pending Google v Viacom showdown, may be referenced for some time to come as the “starting date” of the online revolution against old notions about copyright and intellectual property.

My take on this is, as usual, unusual in that I think two things that everybody is arguing about are actually very clear:

1) Based on existing law, YouTube and DIGG have an obligation to remove offending materials, and probably are in violation themselves for posting those materials, basically ignoring the rights of the copyright holders in favor of community enthusiasm for the coming IP revolution.

2) Existing law is outmoded (perhaps more accurately it should be considered irrelevant and unenforceable, and won’t stand much longer without significant modifications.

Diggers, YouTubers, and other online enthusiasts seem to think that becuase 2 is true, 1 is not true. That’s silly. law is law, and these are violations and everybody knows it. The copyright laws are not outrageous or fundamentally unfair in their *intentions*, and thus they’ll continue to hold up in the courts until we see new laws enacted that are relevant, enforceable, and in line with new sensibilities about what constitutes fair use.

Personally, I’d like to see more experimentation with dramatic expansion of the principle of “fair use” to basically include all non-commercial uses. We see this principle in play in the open source community and even at Google, Yahoo and MSN with many of their web innovations. This openness has arguably done more to foster creativity than any proprietary projects could ever do. Examples: Linux and Firefox to name two of thousands of brilliant and innovative projects that thrive, unencumbered by most old fashioned copyright restrictions.

So, what needs to change here? The law, and thus it’s up to congress to enact new rules that make more sense. Perhaps these could be as simple as suggesting that the commercial benefits of programs and music and other creative stuff should be controlled by the creator of those programs, but that the *societal benefits* should be considered part of the obligation of any artist or creator to contribute to society at large.

Yahoo, Right Media, and the right idea about advertising

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Terry Semel, Yahoo CEO, is optimistic about Yahoo’s purchase of Right Media, an advertising network. This, with Google’s recent aquisition of DoubleClick, may be the beginning of the end for agencies specializing in online (and eventually even offline) advertising as it will make it easier for companies large and small to manage their own advertising and relationships. The recent death of Zunch supports this idea although there may have been many other factors in that corporate meltdown.

Semel brings in the concept of *democracy* to advertising and this is a really interesting idea. Historically advertising industry has been driven by aggressive, emotional sales pitches to clients. Even major account activity may be driven less by careful analysis of ROI on campaigns and more by clever cocktail parties and perceptions of brand coolness.

I’d suggest that in most contexts the concept of “branding” is bogus. Sure, there are many global brands have major influence on consumer behavior, but it’s not clear to me that advertising campaigns do a lot to enhance sales based on these brands. There are surprisingly few high quality studies of this, partly because the power of branding is (foolishly) accepted as a maxim in and out of advertising circles. Google, now considered the world’s top brand, hardly spent a dime on branding advertising early on as it was rising to prominence. Google as brand matters a lot, but it’s not clear there is much benefit to *advertising* the brand.

Much of the truth about ads will shake out as these new advertising networks take hold of the marketplace, and it’s going to be a fascinating thing to watch. Using great free tools like Google Analytics, advertisers are already better able to measure campaign success than ever before, and are starting to hold publishers more accountable for results than for throwing good cocktail parties and making hip and cool presentations.

So I’m with Terry Semel – bring on the advertising democracy dudes!