Saturday, November 18, 2006

Maryam: "My aim is to make Ponzi blush." 

BTW, one of my 2006 predictions sort-of came true this week. "Jason Calacanis will stay at AOL though Easter 2006." Okay, I was off by a few months. And a whole bunch didn't come true. Example: "Scoble will appear on Oprah. His book on corporate blogging will top all the best seller lists, his royalties will eclipse his Microsoft salary, but he'll stay there, because it's in his blood."  

Yucky peanut butter 

First, Yahoo's stock is doing okay, the company is growing and profitable.

It's also diversified, which is another way of saying everything that the memo complains about.

They have turf battles and they duplicate each others' work. In other words, Yahoo is a big company.

There is no way to make them lean and focused, that's not how big companies work. Sheez, some small companies have a hard time being lean and focused.

Yahoo should continue to buy their innovation from outside, because that's where innovation comes from.

What Yahoo may need is someone who can speak for them, who can give an exciting speech, who can lead all the external forces, and internal ones too. What they may be missing is an eloquent founder-type who, when people need to settle a difference, can come in and make the choice. At Microsoft, in the old days when Microsoft worked, people could ask themselves What Would Bill Do? Google has Larry and Sergey. Yahoo may need a leader. But they've got a pretty good foundation to build on. And they could probably go a long, long way without great leadership, since most American companies don't have that.

And come on -- bleeding in purple and yellow? Garlinghouse is a bad ripoff of Guy Kawasaki.

NY Times: "Yahoo has not been nearly as good as Google at reaping profits from the huge volume of search traffic it attracts."

Mike Arrington calls it a "power move."

Josh Allen: "Every company wishes that they could appeal to 50 million normal people and the 57,000 who read TechCrunch. Yahoo! has succeeded at this in two important categories."