Major Meltdown at Yahoo As More Top Execs To Depart

http://kara.allthingsd.com/20100929/exclusive-major-meltdown-at-yahoo-as-more-top-execs-to-depart-including-u-s-head-hilary-schneider/

by mjfern • 16 years ago

24 13 16 years ago

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davidu2• 16 years ago

This is frustrating to watch. Yahoo is a terrific company with some amazing people. And they know how to execute. YUI / YDN / Boss / Flickr / Hadoop / etc.

But they lack any sort of strategy or vision. Wall Street has assigned $0 to the entire value of Yahoo! as a solitary business unit. They should have sold to MSFT but they didn't and now they need to move on.

What they need is to gut the top, promote from within and act like a startup again with a true leader who is willing to think long-term and galvanize the troops. The people at Yahoo! want leadership, and they want a strategy and they want to succeed. But until they get that from the top, they will continue to leave.

The only thing they have going for them in their favor is that they have lost so much value, that taking a gamble to restart the engine isn't that big of a gamble at all.

olegkikin• 16 years ago

Nobody says "I need to yahoo that". And it's a big problem.

Yeah, all the products you listed are cool, but they are not worth $19 billion (current YHOO market cap.).

davidu2• 16 years ago

A lot of people say "I use Yahoo!" Yahoo also has a ton of partner traffic that represents a major chunk of their revenue which is never under the Yahoo! name.

You can have a strategy that doesn't care if people use you as a verb or think of you as a search engine, but you still need to have a strategy. Yahoo! has none.

fleitz2• 16 years ago

Perhaps if Yahoo is worth $19 billion, Facebook is worth $30.

uvince• 16 years ago

Agree, I have been there when Yahoo! executed time and time again, it was impressive, exciting and encouraging. They need leadership and it just hasn't been there for quite some time.

I'm also sorry to see David Ko go, he seemed like a really good guy.

zmmmmm• 16 years ago

Yep.

The way I see it Yahoo is strategically stuck because they put their head in the sand and stopped "radical" innovation about 10 years ago and instead just focussed on doing what they do extremely well. While Apple, Facebook and Google were out there inventing whole new kinds of product Yahoo was just perfecting their existing stuff. Now they are in a tough spot because the world has moved on and they are fast losing end-user value because they don't have any foot holds in new markets.

Personally - I got a Yahoo! Mail account in 1997 and it was my primary "personal" mail account (as in, what I use with friends and family) until last year. Then I got an Android phone, and it blew Yahoo out of my life because the integration of Google services is simply unparalleled on there. This is slowly happening in all kinds of ways, and its not easy to see what the path out is other than to look 5 years ahead and restart the innovation engine and do some totally radical things, as you say.

joshu• 16 years ago

I did not see a lot of execution while I was there.

sireat• 16 years ago

I would say Yahoo is a bit overvalued, or one can say that market still thinks Yahoo can grow/recover.

It is over 2 on Price to tangible Book(I do not really count much goodwill in Yahoo brand), over 20 on P/E.

I am not a pro, so perhaps I am missing something in Yahoo.

joecomotion• 16 years ago

Wait, if what you think they need to do is "gut the top" than why is it frustrating for you to watch the people at the top leave? Whether they're leaving of their own accord or not, the top is getting gutted. . .

cletus• 16 years ago

This doesn't really surprise me: Yahoo has no vision, its leader is a business wonk (rather than a product person) and they've given away any of their assets that had any value (ie their search market share to Bing).

narrator• 16 years ago

The leadership knows how to move their peas around on the plate but they don't know how to cook.

fleitz2• 16 years ago

Yahoo is on life support.

Realize this. Kill it. Move on.

They should drop most of their employees and run the company on life support returning capital to shareholders as it dies. They've missed the boat to sell it and now the guys at the top know the writing is on the wall and are bailing before it tarnishes their careers.

No it's not going to be popular but what else can they do.

abeppu• 16 years ago

Yup. And yet, they're still hiring. I was surprised when earlier this week I was contacted by a Yahoo recruiter.

Major Meltdown at Yahoo As More Top Execs To Depart

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