Yahoo Shakes Things Up

PreacherTom writes "Growing strife inside Yahoo! has erupted into a sweeping management and organizational shakeup. CEO Terry Semel announced yesterday that the company will be reordered into three groups: one to focus on advertisers and publishers, another to focus on Yahoo!'s base of over 500 million users, and a third on technology and development. While Semel denies layoffs are in the future, there will be replacements in the upper echelon for the world's most popular website. The changes, the most extensive at Yahoo in more than five years, cap months of speculation about how it would respond to slowing sales growth, a slumping stock price, and a steady stream of executive departures in the past year."

In related news...

[denebian devil]

In related news, Yahoo also makes sweeping changes to their site design, leading to buggy site behavior, slower load times, and general unrest among Yahoo's populace.

The problem with going public

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Beholden to its investors, Yahoo can't push through hard times with grit and wisdom. It must bow to its ever-fluctuating market value and carve itself into living and dead tissue like a wolf caught in a trap. To emerge from a downturn is to have rent itself into a skeleton of its original physique, and the remaining body is less able to handle the next downturn, especially as those dips never stop coming for a flailing company.

In private hands the company leaders may be indulged to take risks that a public company would never be allowed to contemplate. Jerry Yang sits quietly in his house thankful for getting on the train early, but the company itself dies slowly as its blood gushes into the heads of other Silicon Valley firms.

Yahoo Spread Itself Thin

[organgtool]

The problem is that they try to offer too many services and can't dedicate enough resources to keep those features growing. Therefore, other companies who focus on one only service that competes with Yahoo can do a better job of catering to their users. I have used several of Yahoo's services for a few years and I have watched competing services expand to provide more features than Yahoo. It's not that Yahoo's services are bad - their competitors are simply growing faster since they only focus on one service.

Oddly enough, I have found Yahoo's search to be more accurate than Google for certain topics. Google has always been great when doing narrow searches and it used to be pretty good at wide searches too, but lately I have been finding that I need to go through several pages to find what I am looking for on a wide Google search. I got fed up with this, so I tried Yahoo search and I was pleasantly surprised. Yahoo seems to consistently provide the results I look for within the first few entries. I'm not saying that Yahoo search is better than Google, but it seems like Google doesn't appear to be the magic bullet that it used to be.

Re:Yahoo is in trouble

[badasscat]

If my website logs are a reflection of their popularity they are in big trouble. Google beats them at a rate of 100 to 1.

Yahoo is a lot more than just search. Google is too, but the point is your web site results are not reflective of Yahoo's business as a whole. While they do want a bigger piece of the search advertising pie, I don't think even they really consider search their core business anymore. (It never really was to begin with; they were always more of a directory than a search company, though they've tried to change that in recent years.)

All you need to do is go to Yahoo's web site and then go to Google's web site to see their different business models.

Just for one example, though, I bought my house through Yahoo Real Estate, which partnered with Prudential in my area to give local online real estate listings. Google has no such thing (even though with Google Maps, it would seem a natural fit). Yahoo has many facets like this that you probably don't even realize.