Yahoo Replaces Half Its Board of Directors 48
itwbennett writes "Yahoo's restructuring continued Tuesday with the ousting of 4 board members, including chairman Roy Bostock, according to an IDG News Service report. The move follows the resignation of Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang in January and gives investors something they'd been calling for, says analyst Greg Sterling: 'Investors have felt for a long time that the board was just rubber stamping what the leadership was doing. They want a reinvigorated board with some independence. People will wait to see what's different but I think this will be seen as a positive.'"
Doesn't seem to have had much effect (Score:5, Informative)
Doesn't seem to have had much effect
http://www.google.com/finance?q=YHOO [google.com]
I'd give a link to a YHOO page for their financials but no one uses YHOO anymore.
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The article doesn't say whether they replaced the top half or the bottom half.
Yaa - whoo? (Score:1)
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They are/were only a "search engine" to anyone that only plays lose with terminology.
Yahoo became irrelevant shortly after the amount of web content exploded. They simply bet too low and took the wrong strategy. There is no amount of corporate ballyhoo that will bring them back to relevancy.
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Is Yahoo dead, or can they come back? (Score:5, Informative)
I just went to yahoo.com, and what a confusing mess! It's packed with tiny pictures, lists of links, and generally seems like the site doesn't know what it wants to be. Where do I make a blog, or a Yahoo! store, I don't know. The AOL-style 'be all things' isn't going to work when competitors can be better at just one thing.
Revenue declining year after year isn't going help either.
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Took me a couple minutes but maybe you were looking for the search page rather than the cluttered yahoo homepage?
http://search.yahoo.com
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So where do I make a blog or a Yahoo! store? Finding an uncluttered launch page doesn't change the basic problem: Yahoo! is a confusing mess, and the individual things you can do are not as good as what competitors offer.
I'm sure there's a nice, clean, straight forward link for making a Yahoo! store too... visitors just don't know what it is.
(I just found it here: http://www.google.com/search?q=Yahoo!+store [google.com])
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You wanted http://search.yahoo.com/ [yahoo.com] :)
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People can complain about Mozilla's changes or GNOME's changes over the past few years, but they've kept a strong direction and still know what they want to be. The same can't be said for Yahoo!
I keep thinking of people who use computers by rote (first I click here, then here, etc...) versus the rest of us who are actively looking for the right link or button, and trying to understand how to use it. Yahoo! has always struck me as the former, and maybe they don't change because they're afraid of losing their current user base.
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I know a few people who really love Y!'s home page. I asked a female cyber/online friend/former co-worker who said, "... I think Yahoo homepage is the most entertaining site out there." Huh? Whatever.
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This pic shows a concise summary of what Google did right, and what Yahoo did wrong.
http://img361.imageshack.us/img361/443/yahoovsgoogle1996to2005ys4.png [imageshack.us]
About it...
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/03/in-pursuit-of-simplicity.html [codinghorror.com]
--
Focus isn't about saying yes, but about saying no -- Steve Jobs
Only half? (Score:3)
I guess now they are least half-witted.
they need a Steve Jobs (Score:1)
too bad one isn't forthcoming
More interesting than it would first appear... (Score:5, Informative)
These ousters are more interesting than they first appear...
Judging by this summary [yahoo.net] (now out of date) of the Yahoo board, 2 of the removed board members (Arthur Kern and Gary Wilson) were financial/investment guys (i.e. not technical people), 1 (Vyomesh Joshi) was a former "printer guy" from HP (whose technology credentials are highly suspect given his probable ties to Carly Fiorina), and 1 (Roy Bostock) was the current CEO.
Almost all of the people left on the board appear to have some decent technology credentials. If you wanted to "cut the fat" from the Yahoo board, you could do a lot worse than removing these four people.
Translation (Score:5, Insightful)
Translation: they want a board that will do what Microsoft wants.
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I thought the previous regime made a huge mistake by signing the long-term relationship with Microsoft to use Bing. That was like the Nokia-Microsoft deal - you can't hand off your core competency and expect to have a bright long term future.
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That was like the Nokia-Microsoft deal - you can't hand off your core competency and expect to have a bright long term future.
Most American corporations today believe that exact thing.
only half the board? (Score:2)
all the "top floor folks" need to be tossed on the slide, and they can "Ya-HOOOO" all the way into the dumpster. bunch of hopeless leeches to be burned off, and then corporate doctors can see if there are any veins left to bring this critical case back to life.
valuable technology for Yahoo right now (Score:5, Insightful)
These time travelling board of directors could then safeguard this capital from other potential blunders by locking it up in Apple Computer stock, which according to this inspired 1999 Motley Fool article [fool.com] admits Apple is "a very meaningful distance away from being a top tier Cisco, Intel, Microsoft or Yahoo!. That said, Apple is directionally on target and looking quite strong among the pack of PC makers." It would have been a much cheaper buy than Broadcast.com and left Yahoo! with pockets full of cash in 2012.
Yahoo!'s biggest problem over the years has been their leaders who have been suckers for hucksters who can deliver a good dog-and-pony-show and their organization itself has been unable to successfully deploy any new business concepts.
Seth
Anyone have a car analogy? (Score:2)
In lieu of a car analogy... does anyone else NOT see this as the corporate equivalent of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic?
I can't remember the last time I considered Yahoo! relevant. Sure, I have an email account with them and I use YIM, but they're not really differentiated in any way. I could lose both and still continue on with GMail and GTalk, for example. (Ok, so YIM has a bigger "smiley" set. Ooh. Big whup.)
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Yahoo still has Flickr.
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I don't really know about these things but shouldn't it be the other way around. Why would you take one of the most successful part of your business and remove it from your company?
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Half the board are idiots (Score:3)
Reminds me of a front page headline from a small town in Western Australia in the 1920s: "Half the town council are idiots!" When threatened with a libel lawsuit, the editor agreed to an equally prominent retraction, and sure enough published an equally prominent front page headline the next day: "Half the town council are not idiots!" Genius..
They took a page ... (Score:2)
I hear Kim Kardashian is available.
Isn't this the Angry Monkey Experiment? (Score:2)
http://rtpscrolls.blogspot.com/2006/11/angry-monkeys-and-cargo-cults.html [blogspot.com]
Still around? (Score:2)
Yahoo! is still around? I thought that died off already...