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Yahoo Please Put Up A Fight

Tuesday, January 22, 2008 | 7 comments

My GigaOm column, Yahoo Please Put Up A Fight discusses all those things we have been talking about for a while here.

The problem with Yahoo at the moment is a complete lack of vision about how the web needs to evolve.

The MyYahoo user experience, for all its promises, has remained a marginal “starting point” to the web. I still maintain, MyYahoo CAN be the starting point of the web. It’s just that Jerry Yang and team needs to map out precisely what role it plays in each and every web-based activity that we, users, perform.

There is also a lot of talk about layoffs this week. C’mon, how can you decide whom to layoff before you decide where you want to go with the company?

Comments

[…] Mitra, in her plea for Yahoo to put up a fight, identifies the nub of the issue: The problem with Yahoo at the moment is a complete lack of vision […]

blog.vortexdna.com » Blog Archive » First principles, Clarice Tuesday, January 22, 2008 at 6:47 PM PT

But the idea of layoffs is not a new tack. Liquidation of payroll is one of the easiest ways to reduce operation and admin costs to boost the profit margin in a quarterly report. And unfortunately, given the push of Wall Street on strategy, the onus to meet quarterly expectations has for the last two decades driven U.S. companies more than longterm strategy. That the tech industry is now accepting this standard just means that it is maturing in a U.S. business sense.

Tom Lutzenberger Tuesday, January 22, 2008 at 9:11 PM PT

tom, nice comment, funny how maturing in your sentence looks like adolescence … feed me now!~

gregory Tuesday, January 22, 2008 at 11:09 PM PT

I have to agree … instant gratification and shooting from the hip - Wall Street is a master at that. Very low level of analysis.

Sramana Mitra Wednesday, January 23, 2008 at 10:57 AM PT

“There is also a lot of talk about layoffs this week. C’mon, how can you decide whom to layoff before you decide where you want to go with the company?”

May be they have decided where they want to go with the company and hence the layoffs.

Mohit Friday, January 25, 2008 at 4:21 AM PT

[…] Yahoo Please Put Up A Fight […]

4C: The Yahoo Turnaround Formula - Sramana Mitra on Strategy Monday, January 28, 2008 at 11:00 AM PT

Microsoft bid for Yahoo ..

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080201/microsoft_yahoo.html

Is this the end of Yahoo chapter ??

Balaji Friday, February 1, 2008 at 8:38 AM PT

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