How Yahoo could transform itself (emphasis on “could”!)

Summary:

Yahoo is one of the most popular destinations on the web. Then why has it struggled so? (Need I count the ways? The list is too long for a blog like this that aspires to be brief). I’m not going to invent reasons that it is failing. Many conjectures can be back fit to apparent perfection (but not necessarily with accuracy). Let’s just get down to what they need to do.

 

The To Do List:

(1)   Make Jeff Weiner the CEO. I think ValleyWag cited performance stats of units under his capable management hands. In short, stellar. Give him the reins!

(2)   Make Yahoo Mail a Platform! It brings in 40 million plus people PER DAY in the US alone. The stickiness rivals social networks. Yea sure, Yahoo’s afraid of messing with the golden goose because the reality is their Mail product enabled them to survive the Google Nuclear Winter – ie, Google’s rise and Yahoo’s scramble to build a search engine that didn’t suck. (It goes without saying that Lycos and Excite – formerly multibillion dollar market cap companies – bit the dust during the Winter.) Back to the case for the Platform: people do their mail thing, then what? Developers can do stuff. Let developers do all the things they can do on F8, for starters. Give them “presence” so they can build games that can tell when friends are online. (I think meebo should do all these same things, by the way). Why might Yahoo not do this? Again, Mail is the golden goose. Plus in their eyes, F8 might not prove anything, so they wait a few years until it’s obvious it does create enormous value, and then what? It’s a lot harder to build a relevant platform, even with the traffic Mail generates. (Of course, Mail recently sunk below Hotmail in popularity, so there’s no guarantee the golden goose will stay so healthy).

(3)   Whew, that second one was a long one. Frankly, it didn’t do it justice, but you get the idea: embrace developers to help you figure it out! Now the third one: aggressively pitch Yahoo Mail to universities (and anybody who will listen!). I don’t know much about the mail company they just acquired other than their revenues are quite small relative to the purchase price. Anyways, this point is obvious: you get the students while their young, they’ll use your mail for a long time! And we know how great it is to have a golden goose like that, especially when who knows when Winter 2.0 might occur? Why might Yahoo note do this? Well, it’s really hard to convince them to do it, so it seems given Google has tried this for the past couple years. Schools don’t necessarily have as intense privacy concerns as companies, but who exactly can make a decision on the mail system for the entire school? It’s a toughy, but a goody.

 

Posts I Disagree With (Not Necessarily On the Details Because I Probably Didn’t Read Them, But Just Because They Are Generally Negative on Yahoo) (aka, PIDWNNOTDBIPDRTBJBTAGN):

A.    http://blog.seorevolution.com/2007/01/26/how-yahoo-screwed-itself/

B.     http://www.offeroftheday.com/post/woot-yahoo-deal/

C.     http://www.kbcafe.com/iBLOGthere4iM/?guid=20040830072916

 

A Picture (And Not Necessarily A Pretty One):

 

 

 

The “Winter” is the downslope off that huge matterhornesque peak in the middle there. Yahoo knows the Golden Goose saved them.

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