Focused from the inside out

Posted July 17th, 2007 at 4:33 pm by Jerry Yang, CEO & Chief Yahoo

 23 Comments / Filed in: Trends & News

Based on the hundreds of people — employees, investors, partners, advertisers, users, peers — who’ve reached out to me over the past month, there seems to be no shortage of folks who want Yahoo! to succeed. Put me at the top of that list.

The last four weeks have been occupied by candid conversations and an intense analysis of our assets, challenges, lessons learned, and opportunities. It’s helped me look at Yahoo! through new eyes — an approach I think is critical for a guy who’s been around for 12 years. While our business continues to grow, we need to dramatically improve our performance and I intend to put us back on a winning path.

So, how do we get there? To be honest, we don’t have all the answers today — there’s a lot of work to do and some tough decisions ahead. I have a great sense of urgency to move in a fast yet focused way, but we want to do this once and do it thoroughly so it will take time. I intend to spend the next 100 days mapping out a game plan and working with Sue, Filo, Blake, and the team to put the right organization in place and make any necessary changes. We need to invest in areas that are most critical to our success and de-emphasize those that are underperforming or match up with our priorities. There will be no sacred cows.

I believe that Yahoo! is too often defined by the competitive landscape, rather than by what we can accomplish with our assets. I’m determined for us to define our own path. Here’s where it starts: We see Yahoo! as a deep and active marketplace — an ecosystem of hundreds of millions of consumers, advertisers, publishers, and developers. All benefit from the presence of the other, and the healthier the ecosystem is, the healthier Yahoo! is. That ecosystem today is not thriving as it should and there’s a wide gap between where we are and where we need to be.

We want to deliver the most insights, serve the best content, and create the greatest value. To achieve that, we plan to take advantage of three major differentiators — consumer insights, a prime asset we’ve frankly under-leveraged to date; openness, as demonstrated by the online exchange we’re building with Right Media; and being the partner of choice, as we focus on creating relationships like those with Ebay and the newspaper consortium.

There’s a lot of heavy lifting ahead, but I’m feeling good about our awesome assets, our initial progress against our challenges, and our vast opportunities if we nail down and execute against the right plan. It’s imperative that we accelerate the transformation of Yahoo!. Our immediate priorities are to invest in the right businesses and shift our product focus accordingly, speed our decision-making and execution, channel our technology assets to build game-changing platforms, and do a better job of attracting, developing and motivating talent while rekindling the culture of winning that built this great company.

One last note: Don’t be surprised if you don’t see a lot of me in the press in the near future as we keep our heads down working through the challenges and opportunities at hand. I’m sure not everyone will agree with that approach, but it feels right to me. I’m a big believer in doing versus talking. We’re focused on making changes from the inside out and we’ll get out there when the time is right.

In the meantime, thanks for your encouragement and support.

Jerry Yang
CEO & Chief Yahoo

Post a Comment Bookmark This Digg This

23 Comments Add your own

G. Champion | July 17th, 2007 at 5:49 pm

Dear Jerry,

Hope this note finds you well.

I’m reaching out to you today as the news of Yahoo continues to be one of swirling rumors and mis-information.

My background over the last ten years has been in television, media, and new media, working for such companies as 20th Century Fox TV, Fox Sports, DreamWorks, ManiaTV.com, and MusicPlusTV.com,

The reason for this note, is I think we can help each other. I have a “killer ap” of an idea that will put Yahoo’s reach into social networking with that of Facebook, Myspace, and YouTube - with demos with disposable income for high revenues. This project is fully developed and needs the strength of a Yahoo-type company to expand quickly in this ever changing landscape.

I would very much like to pitch this to you in person or by phone in the coming days.

Respectfully,

Gregg

Gregg Champion
Champion Media & Entertainment
championmedia@gmail.com
818.644.5500

Shahid | July 18th, 2007 at 5:55 am

If you want some valuable insight, please read the following:

I agree that there is a lot of work to do and that Yahoo needs to change its focus. However, I cannot believe that everything is conducted on such a reactive basis. Why didn’t Yahoo, during the past 12 years, always look ahead? Why should we believe that you will do anything valuable? The truth is that over the past 3 years this company had more potential than any single company out there. All that potential has evaporated and its simply starting to fall apart. Quarter after quarter we continue to hear the same story. First, Terry Semel flat out lied. Secondly, everyone else in management was “excited.” For what? For losing billions and billions of dollars. From becoming a global leader instead of company that is continuing to see smaller and smaller margins. I can go on and on. Yahoo reminds me of Ford. A poor company, with a poor focus that at one point could have dominated the auto industry. Because of poor management and poor engineering, Ford has fallen apart. Yahoo = Ford. Your focus should be on generating value. You should focus on generating revenues. Here is a simple answer, if you can’t promise shareholders, and I truly mean promise, increase value in the company through better earnings over the next 12 months, YOU NEED TO SELL. It’s simple, you (management) have had 3 years to do this and you have flat out failed. It’s actually amazing that given where Yahoo was positioned just a few years ago where it is today. It’s actually probably about the same progress that would have transpired had a monkey ran the company. It’s really quite sad that you (yes you, management) will not look at yourselves and recognize who is to blame. This group has failed and will not prove me wrong. My true belief is that this company either put itself up for sale or watch it fall apart and you’ll destroy the future of thousands of employees. Dont’ make this mistake.

Shahid | July 18th, 2007 at 7:11 am

Take a minute and read the negative aspects of Yahoo. Read what analysts and the industry have to say. It’s relatively simple. You are not doing a good job and have not for quite some time. Like I have said before, unless you can actually promise sharedholders greater value (significantly given the underperformance over the past few years) you should put the company up for sale. It doesn’t matter if like it or not you are in direct competition with Google. Guess what, they are better and continue to deliver. They are the equivalent to Toyota vs. Ford. We are now at the point where you should recognize that the value locked in this company can be better extracted from other companies with intelligent management. I know that no one important reads this blog, it is just like every other part of Yahoo. Way too much work for something that doesn’t matter. You should let the creative group and your engineers know they haven’t created anything worth looking at. Just face it, your best products from the last few years have been developed by other groups. I am really curious, what exactly does your engineering, sales and marketing group do all day? Apparently not too much. Somehow you got together with others and decided that you wanted to through more weight into the sinking ship by adding more employees. Why not just hire good employees who can actually do their job? Throwing more people at it doesn’t fix the problem.

sinisa | July 18th, 2007 at 10:06 am

I find Yahoo!s main site too cluttered which is a big no-no given the information overload we are all experiencing in general, and while browsing the net in particular. Just opening http://www.yahoo.com gives me a headache.

I think you should 1) simplify your websites in this respect, 2) improve your search engines (to be faster, and more available - I keep getting “server busy” in my Yahoo group), and 3) keep inventing new services.

Paul Li | July 18th, 2007 at 10:35 am

You will need to reinvent Yahoo! as a platform of the choice for the internet search, advertising, social communities, etc. You must offer advanced APIs of your (offered) services for others to integrate with. Most importantly, you need to hire creative engineers who might be your rule breakers, but can do a far more better job. You must do a better job in protecting people’s privacy, being the defender of people’s rights who’s using your service. Pay your debt in this regard.

At last, Invent something new and exciting, rather than following the other leader.

ash | July 18th, 2007 at 1:50 pm

See the company to Google. They will be happy to buy it to get the traffic and generate more money together. Yahoo! has not been able to capitalize on the immense traffic it receives at it websites and that’s not good for a company which was positioned to be the best company a couple of years back.

Yihong Ding | July 18th, 2007 at 2:57 pm

I fairly agree with the previous comments made by Shahid. Personally I have good feeling about Yahoo. But unfortunately Yahoo had made too many mistakes in the last few years.

Yahoo NEED A BIGGER AND BROADER VIEW!

I always have a question: if everyone else could decide to follow Google, why should Yahoo follow Google’s strategy? Certainly many other small companies could live under the umbrella of Google. But Yahoo cannot. To be competitor, Yahoo has to figure out an extraordinary route to the future instead of copying what Google has succeeded.

Look up and look forward, instead of look down and look backward. Yahoo needs to figure out a broader picture of web evolution. This is a company like Yahoo should do, and this is a company like Yahoo could do.

From the evolutionary point of view, Google has accomplished a stagewise success. What Yahoo should do is not entangled in this current stage but look for the battle field of the next stage. At this stage, no one could beat Google. Google has already been the winner. But web continuously evolves, and this is the chance not only for Yahoo, but also for everyone. But since Yahoo has already been a successful company for years, Yahoo certainly has greater chances than others to be the winner of the next battle. The only question is—whether Yahoo is willing to listen advises and has the courage to lead to the next generation.

A vision of web evolution! I believe this is probably the most important of anything that Yahoo needs. Be respect to the web and be honest to the web, just like that we should be respect to the nature and be honest to the nature. WWW is no longer a toy or a simple man-made product. It has become self-organizing world. Google succeeds because it follows the rules so far, though probably unintentionally. Yahoo certainly has many chances to win the battle back if Yahoo would like to carefully think of the fact of web evolution.

Jerry, now it is no you shoulder to make decisions. Can Yahoo do it right this time? We have fervent expectations.

— Yihong

sg | July 18th, 2007 at 7:16 pm

Jerry,

Questions for you to address:

1) Why is spam out of control on Mail?

2) Why isn’t Yahoo address book integrated with Flickr?

3) Why don’t you promote search shortcuts, especially local ones?

4) Why don’t you offer Yahoo login/pwd infrastructure on partner sites? Consumers hate managing multiple login/pwds.

5) Why is there such an inconsistent video experience across Yahoo properties?

6) Why is everything so slow on Yahoo? Why can’t you make this a top priority?

7) You need to hire top notch engineering talent. Go ahead and give them a ton options if need be. Engineers are the lifeblood of a tech company, not MBAs and media types.

8) the New My Yahoo product is simply awful. Experience needs to be consistent and fast and simple!

9) Parter more closely with Paypal.

Japanesewhisky | July 18th, 2007 at 7:28 pm

My experience of Yahoo is that its number one, overriding priority is not the experience of the user. It is one very hight priority but not the overriding priority. I was solely based on Yahoo web services three years ago. No longer.

Without an overriding user experience focus, you can sometimes seem to to be forcing things down people`s throats: obtrusive not classy advertising; partnerships with other big companies that are so full of limitations and exploitations of the users that they lose their value and impact on the Yahoo experience; half assed service redesigns. Google is usually much better. First and foremost they make useable services. Of course they are making pots of money but they have suspension in their vehicle. You are like a bone shaker, too close to the profit making road. The result is that people don`t click on your ads, prefer google services, and then you get into mad dashes for moolah, which will probably make things worse. Your “winning path” has too many forks in it, too many destinations - possibly inevitably because of the pressure the management is now under from all kinds of directions. In the long run, to prosper Yahoo has to regain the most important overriding focus in any service industry.

Ian Bell | July 18th, 2007 at 8:54 pm

Jerry,

I am glad to see that you and your company are owning up to the problems surrounding you. A company’s lifespan is always cyclical, and there will of course be bad times; people should not judge a company solely when things are looking down. Figure out what the problem is, get rid of the people responsible and fix it. What people need to understand is that a company as big as Yahoo cannot move on a dime, it’s not that simple to replace people or to turn this “tanker” in the right direction.

As a consumer and user of Yahoo, I feel like your company has lost focused. It has followed others in this space where it should be leading. What was once innovation has turned into emulation, and we need to fix that.

A lot of Yahoo’s properties have been poorly marketed or run. I will use Yahoo Tech as an example (and will likely get slammed by Scott Moore) since it’s a property I am familiar with. There are basically no professional product reviews, little in the way of content, and the site feels like an extension of Yahoo Shopping. How do you bring in a person like Patrick Houston (former Editor-In-Chief of Cnet) and have little more than user reviews on the site? Where is the value for the consumer? The front page is rarely updated, the whole site feels like a ghost town, yet according to Comscore, Yahoo Tech receives more traffic than PC World! Imagine the REAL potential of this site! There are barely any ads there, is a sales team selling it? What about providing original reviews and content you can license? Let’s get that Yahoo name out there, syndicate it and actually be a household name again.

The rest of Yahoo’s properties seem indicative of the same situation. It is as if a five-year-old is flying an F-16 jet; get a real pilot behind the controls. Cut off the fat, focus on your core strengths and run each property as a separate business. They need to be individually strong, otherwise everything crumbles.

-Ian

gag | July 19th, 2007 at 6:19 am

If their is news about any other Internet company, their should be yahoo’s too, close by.

Jonathan Matkowsky | July 19th, 2007 at 10:54 pm

Dear Jerry,

I’m a “newbie” with Yahoo!, very excited to be on this journey, and appreciate and respect what you are doing, but what I’m saying here is on my own personal behalf only. Part of what I personally think you are conveying here is that you are trying to ensure that YAHOO! transcends other great brands and becomes firmly embedded in peoples’ minds as what Saatchi & Saatchi refer to as a “lovemark,” delivering beyond expectations of great performance, reaching everybody’s heart as well as their mind, “creating an intimate, emotional connection that you just can’t live without. Ever.” It is obvious that YAHOO! already matters to people, or there would never be such strong comments on this blog. That is evidence that what you are doing is working.

What I really want to emphasize, however, is that when people like Om Malik, on GigaOM, ponder why you would ask for 100 days, it becomes obvious to me that they are not familiar with “The First 90 Days,” by Michael Watkins, published by Harvard Business School Press. Mr. Watkins, an Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, emphasizes that perhaps the most destructive attitude a leader in transition can adopt, even a leader within the same company who is moving from one role to another, is to arrive with “the answer.” I think it is great that you insisted on taking the time you need to learn and think about how you will succeed as a new leader. I don’t think many people would have the courage to take the time that is needed to implement critical success strategies.

In any case, on an even more personal note, I think that the new beta version of My Yahoo! is great, and Yahoo! GO simply rocks.

ppt | July 20th, 2007 at 10:17 am

Jerry
Yahoo was the first website to show me what the internet was all about.

As a customer, I truly beleive in you and your team’s ability to turn things around.

Good luck for the future.

-ppt

PS : The new version of Yahoo Mail is really cool.

Jeff nwgolfpro | July 20th, 2007 at 10:42 am

First and formost yahoo has failed its users and its shareholders! You love to throw free shares out like its nothing, you do stock buybacks but the amount you buyback doesnt cover the shares you hand out for free, so you are flooding the market with yahoo shares! Yahoo has destroyed the yahoo message boards with the way they are presented, they were alot better the way they used to look. I for one play alot of yahoo games and they are overrun with room lockers and spammers, the ways you are trying to block them is not working, you actually make it harder for real people to get into the rooms and play. The bots are easy to eliminate if you wanted, get the bot maker prog and cancel all ids with the email address used. The bot maker I actually saw being used by a neighbor kid he was able to make 50 ids in under 3 minutes and he used the same email for all 50, he said it uses the same email for every bot it makes on the net, so there must be hundreds of thousands of ids with that email address. I saw a guy in a room with a bunch of bots, asked him what prog he used and the email it gave and it was the same! Im not a computer engineer but in about 1 minute I could eliminate alot of headaches for yahoo games right now! Yahoo is a great company, I have owned it for almost 10 years and I truely want to continue owning it for years to come, but without yahoo doing something major, either a merger or a sale it doesnt seem to have a very bright future. It is surely dead money for 2 years or more, worse yet it will be sub $15 soon if you dont get your act together!

NWGOLFPRO

Floyd | July 20th, 2007 at 2:27 pm

You must not have the version with ads platered all over it. Jerry, you wanted user feedback, take a look at the thread from May started here by John Kremer. 242 comments to date, all from users angry about your product, and several switching to other paid services (away from not just Yahoo but from Yahoo’s partners too). And these are just the ones complaining. If the shape of things to come doesn’t start to look a LOT more like the way the Yahoo Groups beta is going (which is a really impressive, responsive, interactive, user-driven process), Yahoo will be in big trouble, I think. A lot of services have a lot of issues, and only some of them have user feedback boards for you to even know about it. Yahoo mail, I assume one of your biggest products has no feedback/suggestion board, no active blog (2 months between updates isn’t “active”), and no way to gather user data, yet it is in the middle of an “upgrade”. I say get as serious as you can about improving your product first, chase ads later. Ads all over a mediocre product will lose to the ads on the well designed product every time, I’d bet.

Joe Rodulavic | July 22nd, 2007 at 2:22 pm

Jerry,

I hope you are considering merging with a company that will be able to exploit Yahoo’s assets effectively. I specifically believe that there would be many benefits by merging with Google. I also believe that Google’s culture would make the merger and transition very appealing for Yahoo associates.

Additionally, I know that the shareholders would vote a resounding “Yes” to a merger with Google.

Simon | July 23rd, 2007 at 6:29 am

I am moderate size individual shareholder.. 10,000 shares. I am quite upset at what has gone on with this company over the last few years. I am still holding on… barely.. But please…. do SOMETHING.. stop the pain. The 100 days are ticking away..

Just saw an interesting idea.. not spam

http://ideaposts.com/blog/

BDD | August 1st, 2007 at 10:43 pm

Jerry,

If you are serious about fixing Yahoo and winning back your once loyal fan base, start by removing the ads from the email page. This practice is essentially spamming your own customers. The amount of lost customer good will, from this action, is reaching investor news. This is one more signal to investors that the company is trouble and is polarizing whats left of it’s custormer base.

baldai | August 28th, 2007 at 6:42 am

I like this post. good luck in the future

Sathya Prakash | September 10th, 2007 at 1:52 pm

Hi Yahoo and Jerry,
You letter sounds like a great plan. One more to add to the list is the Customer Care department. I worked at that department for five months only and had a very horrible experience. There is no consideration given on how agents will support customers if the product is new but they do throw a one page training document that does prepare the agents. So customer satisfaction is at the bottom. Please look at the customer care department to create a good work environment and also to help prepare the agents who support your (Yahoo) products.

Thanks

Anna~Anna | October 19th, 2007 at 3:31 am

Get Ernie back please.

Grandma Martin | October 24th, 2007 at 1:53 pm

Don’t you dare ruin our 360 Blog. It has been more troublesome in the past month so whatever you think you are doing, isn’t helping. I am not a baby boomer, I am 74 and don’t want to tolerate young whippersnappers messing with out stuff.
We have many friends there and don’t want to loose them. Some are moving already to someplace I have never heard of.

Baldai | January 27th, 2008 at 8:54 am

Yeah Thats nice!