Thursday, April 5, 2012

Yahoo Dabba Do!


No one likes second place. That means we really don’t like third place, or worse. Welcome to Yahoo. Yahoo’s third CEO, Scott Thompson, has started layoffs to around 2000 people or 14% of their staff. Thompson said in a memo on Wednesday, “"The changes we're announcing today will put our customers first, allow us to move fast, and to get stuff done,". Most, like me, aren’t buying it. More on the layoffs here.

I’m not buying it, because rarely can you do more with less, especially when you have to maintain current operations and reinvent yourself at the same time. I think the biggest issue is lack of vision. Look around, how many internet portal companies do you still see that matter in your daily life? So when we don’t know what we are going to be when we grow up, we don’t. We get lost.

Yahoo has tried to fix that, with new CEOs. Each with a new vision, each with a new dabble. A dabble is not a vision. Multiple dabbles just get ugly. Yahoo Dabba Do! Next stop Bedrock, all the way at rock bottom.

There is a place and a strategy for web portal like companies. Being a good consolidator and aggregator of information with easy links to what I need. Pull feeds from other social sites into my news portal, these things I will use. There are not cuts to the top, so the only reason I see for cuts is to maximize profits, not maximize success.

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