Ask HN: If you were the CEO of Yahoo, what would be your priorities?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8378754

by kkhire • 12 years ago

4 9 12 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Mayer has been acquiring a lot of companies which haven't really generated a monumental revenue. And their Alibaba IPO money is worth a ton. What would you be doing to make moves on Google and their other competitors?

dylanhassinger• 12 years ago

1. Focus on 3 Products: Homepage, Mail, and Photos. Make a commitment to turn these into THE most useful services on the internet. Easy to use = Yahoo's strength

2. Move everything else to a division called Yahoo Labs, maybe spin it off into its own company that can experiment more.

3. Invest heavily in the developer culture and developer ecosystem, and optimize for attracting new talent to the company.

gregmorton• 12 years ago

Get the yahoo bar out of flickr (yeah I know, it won't save Yahoo).

davismwfl• 12 years ago

1. Stop all projects that are not contributing to revenue, don't have a path to revenue or aren't contributing to the community. 2. Culture. Focus on the teams building products, reward those doing well, and get rid of those not. Restore work at home for those who do the work, get rid of those who don't. I don't agree with punishing everyone because of a few assholes. 3. Clean up yahoo home page, it is cluttered and too busy. Add a feature like the old iGoogle for those who want the extra stuff on their landing page. 4. Pick a product/service and make it the best thing out there, too much diversity causes fragmentation and a lack of focus and doesn't attract or help you retain talent. This doesn't mean only do 1 thing, just focus to make 1 thing best in class first, then keep moving through each product.

I am sure we have no clue of all the issues on-going within yahoo, but from a product/project and culture standpoint those would be my initial goals.

general_failure• 12 years ago

Yahoo needs to get into phones and for this it needs to develop a system that lets people replace google with yahoo. so emails, account sycing, photo syncing things like that.

crazypyro• 12 years ago

Seriously, the mobile spread of Yahoo is laughable for such a large tech company. They seem to have completely missed/ignored the mobile train.

kkhire2• 12 years ago

I fully agree. No idea why they are willingly disregarding such a lucrative market

oakaz• 12 years ago

Create a autonomic new Flickr team to build a new consistent API and a UI that is actually nice and usable.

kkhire2• 12 years ago

I think they should rebrand and start moving on instagram territory

sjg007• 12 years ago

1. Video and live streaming. 2. Photo sharing made simple across devices. 3. Continue mobile appification. 4. Siri competitor for your life (email, contacts, calendar). This is what aviate needs to do.

Ask HN: If you were the CEO of Yahoo, what would be your priorities?

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