I'm kind of surprised that the comments here are so positive. What does this letter really say?
So today I’m rolling out a new management structure
OK, what is it?
the notorious silos are gone
To be replaced by....
I’m creating a new Customer Advocacy group ... Our Customer Care team does an incredible job with the amazing number of people who come to them, but they need better resources. So we’re investing in that. After all, you deserve the very best.
(Yawn.)
Maybe I don't know enough about Yahoo to understand this post's significance. But it strikes me as a generic, "there's a new sheriff in town" kind of post, meant to rally the troops... meh.
That's what I read as well, but maybe I'm just jaded from watching the "silos" to "centralization" pendulum that the last company I worked for kept swinging on back and forth forever.
Bartz is going to be a great CEO. I admire and respect the woman immensely! Sometimes what a company or an organization needs is simply a great leader -- somebody who can inspire the worker bees to do what worker bees do best.
I'm legitimately impressed - she's really between a rock and a hard place with how she communicates. Yahoo needs a "regime change" feel to it, and Yang was always very informal, no punctuation, etc. So she's got to be different - but, Yahoo can't weather bureaucracy, formality, nonsense right now. I think she's being different and professional while casual at the same time. That's got to be a hard line to walk. Feeling better for Yahoo's prospects for the future than at any time since I ditched Yahoo mail a couple years ago for Gmail.
Would not have expected that kind of tone from a Fortune 500 CEO addressing the public, but it certainly made me think "she's going to be good for Yahoo!"
I had recently written off Yahoo as dead. Today, I hardly use any of their products at all, except Flickr.
My Yahoo Mail is the old outdated version because their updated version seemed more designed to deliver ads than user experience and all it does is deliver spam.
Calendar, briefcase, mail, search, news, finance - I now do all of these on Google where the technology is faster and cleaner. Innovation appears to have died at Yahoo.
That said, her comments here made me rethink my writing them off. Semel and Yang really did a number on this company. Semel was a looter who never wanted to get his hands dirty with operations and Yang's head is in the clouds.
This letter is a good start, let's hope Yang has the wisdom and humility to not get in the way. I believe he's still on the board.
They should start by offering IMAP to all the paying customers of Yahoo Mail. It's amazing that they can do this for iPhone, but not for desktop especially for customers who are paying for this service. Google gives us all this for free.
i can understand her optimism, but how are they going to take market share away from google?
according to google finance, google has about 20k employees bringing in 5.7B each quarter, and yahoo has about 14k employees bringing in 1.8B/quarter.
i think the yahoo plan is to get microsoft to buy the search platform and then make a advertising deal with google. this will not only get yahoo more money than they are worth now, but it will also make regulatory agencies happy.
"i can understand her optimism, but how are they going to take market share away from google?"
That's what everyone said about Apple before Jobs came back too. It's amazing how an energized, focused leader with an "outside" perspective can make a world of difference. Look at Apple now.
Yahoo is a content company, google is a search company. Unfortunately, being a content company is more labour intensive than being a search company, especially when you are trying to be an international company.
Yahoo needs to get off the content train, sell some of its premium services and failed integrations (delicious, anyone?) and push harder on the "your mail contact list is your social network" push that they have going. Fortunately, they have a lot of good properties. Unfortunately, their integration is absolutely abysmal.
So today I’m rolling out a new management structure
OK, what is it?
the notorious silos are gone
To be replaced by....
I’m creating a new Customer Advocacy group ... Our Customer Care team does an incredible job with the amazing number of people who come to them, but they need better resources. So we’re investing in that. After all, you deserve the very best.
(Yawn.)
Maybe I don't know enough about Yahoo to understand this post's significance. But it strikes me as a generic, "there's a new sheriff in town" kind of post, meant to rally the troops... meh.