It has been more than 8 months since Brad Garlinghouse, a Yahoo senior vice president, wrote an internal note to senior staff about his vision on the current company’s (lack of ?) strategy, Yahoo finally took the step to replace CEO Terry Semel with "Chief Yahoo" Jerry Yang. The question is what’s next? What’s the game plan? Employee morale is at its lowest, and a few key management positions remain unfilled including the CTO job. There hasn’t been any innovation coming from Yahoo for a long time. A few months ago Yahoo opened what it calls "Brickhouse," a unit devoted to developing innovative new products, but so far there's been only one release--Yahoo Pipes, an interactive feed aggregator.
Yahoo has been acting like an “old media” company for the last 36 months. With 12,000 employees and so many different products and business units, Yahoo has become a large, complex corporation that is slow responding to competitive threats, such as Google on search and search advertising. They missed out totally on the whole social media space and are way behind the curve in their video sharing properties (they did a pretty poor job at that too). They failed to integrate their services or create a centralized place for people to hang out. Yahoo's 360 social network has not been widely adopted, although there is ‘some’ good stuff there.
More importantly, Yahoo! has failed to articulate a clear strategy about how the company will compete with Google and be the dominant player for years to come. Better monetizing search is NOT a company strategy, it's only a tactic. Improving a lead in graphical ads is NOT a strategy, it's a tactic. Doing a few more acquisitions is NOT a strategy, it’s a tactic. As a career strategist for 25 years I can tell that they don’t have one. That’s a very serious problem. This fleet of 757s is flying without navigational support or any sense of destiny.
This is like the first life crisis of a teenager and the next two years will be important turning points in Yahoo! history.
What it is telling us is: If Yahoo has trouble competing against Google as a media company then what hopes do traditional media companies have? I want to write about the next media crisis.
