The Other Place Where Innovation Goes to Die

There was the joke that AOL was where innovation went to die.  Well, AOL move over, you have company.  While Yahoo may not yet be the Sarasota to AOL’s Bradenton in the Florida of the Tech world, it is becoming the “Shady Pines” of innovation: a place where technological companies are warehoused and  then die of sheer neglect.  Don’t believe me?  Look at Yahoo’s track record as of late.  Delicious?  It is highly popular.  If it had stayed on its own, it would have probably been a solid company.  But Yahoo bought it, then promptly did nothing with it.  And then, in December, came that wonderful rest home term: sunset.  Ah yes, as in “off into the sunset”. Of course there were others set to ride off to Valhalla with Delicious: MyBlogLog, Yahoo Buzz, Yahoo Picks and Yahoo Bookmarks,  all areas that Yahoo had either bought or started, then left them with as little support as possible. 

One month later, and the New York Times is talking about a possible second shoe dropping.  In a piece called “At Flickr, Fending Off Rumors and Facebook”, the NYT discussed how Yahoo management is letting the popular photo sharing site lose ground to Facebook. Guess how?  According to Stewart Butterfield, one of the co-founders of Flickr:

“We just missed some opportunities that we could have tried if we were independent and raised our own money. Who knows what would have happened?”

Now in its defense, Flickr is far from dead. Flickr is home to around five billion photos and about three million more are added daily.  According to Matthew Rothenberg, the head of Flickr, the company is profitable.  The second point is that the pictures that are uploaded to Flickr are a wealth of artistic images, many of which are magazine quality.  The place where Flickr is failing are the pictures that people like me take – questionable quality shots of family and friends.  As pointed out, visiting Facebook is a daily ritual for many people, but that simply is not the case with Flickr. 

So the question becomes is the status quo something that is OK?  Does Flickr have to follow every twist and turn brought on by new technologies and Facebook, or is it OK to stand firm?  Rothenberg promises more improvements on the horizon, but other than the recent support on Twitter, Yahoo’s top executives have barely mentioned Flickr publicly for some time. Few top executives actually have a public Flickr account.

While Flickr may not be dead yet, neglect of a division can eventually take its toll.  Just remember, sometimes, someone else picks your rest home. 

It’s A Festivus Miracle!

Today is Festivus. In accordance with tradition, I submit my 2010 Airing of Grievances. The following have disappointed me over the past year, in no particular order:

• Carol Bartz for still not figuring out what Yahoo is, $@#$#%#^^$%!!!!!!!!!!!. Of course no one else has either, but really, she is the head Hooligan, so she should have some idea.
• Steve Jobs for not allowing Chris Chang’s company to make a really cool action figure of him. Yeah I know, someone would put a mini Darth Vader helmet on it and then make a viral video which would piss him off to no end. But really, Steve, I promise I wouldn’t skewer you too much.
• Ray Ozzie for not gathering the Microsoft developers French revolution style and storming Ballmer’s office for cancelling Courier. Of course I get the fact that Ray didn’t want his breast exposed as in the painting. But still, it would have been awesome.
• Every single TV maker in the world. 3-D. Really? After all these years and the only thing you can offer as an advancement in 3-d technology is polarized glasses? Really?
• Google. Before rolling out Google TV, don’t you think it would have been a really keen idea to get the networks to buy into it?
• Apple. Ping. The less said, the better.
• Airlines that think that voice recognition is really cool. It isn’t. It’s annoying. I have to say the same thing five times before the system recognizes it, or else do my impression of Lillith from Frasier.
• The TSA. Come on guys, I’ve been looking for a real good grope, and nothing. Am I that undesirable? I feel cheated.
• People on Facebook who immediately are up in arms when a change is made to the system. There’s a life out there. Go get one.
• By that same token, Facebook. You know if you set everyone’s privacy to the highest and let them decide to open themselves up, you wouldn’t have so many people out there screaming. Just a thought.
• Apple again for pretending to be East Germany over losing an iPhone, complete with Stasi-like raids in the middle of the night.
• Steve Jobs again, this time for telling left handed people that the iPhone is perfect and they are not.
• Viacom, for still continuing with a lawsuit that has been thrown out of court once.
• Microsoft for allowing Kin to see the light of day.
• Telecom companies that have made a standard like 4G a marketing tool. When you do things like that, then we know you aren’t telling the truth about anything, OK?
• And finally, to politicians who decry Net Neutrality really loud. Please to note that those who cry the loudest are the ones who have received huge amounts of money from the telecom companies. I still think that our legislators need to wear NASCAR jumpsuits with patches of the companies and groups who have sponsor them. Now that would be transparency I could get behind.

Sorry Mark, But It’s Really “The Year of the Suck”

According to Time, Mark Zuckerberg is the Person of the Year.  Why not?  Facebook looks like it going to take over the earth.  The guy’s not even out of his twenties and there has been a Golden Globe nominated major motion picture made about him. It seems like everything Facebook touches right now succeeds. 

But I think that Time missed the boat, because I don’t think that this should be the Year of the Zuck, but because I think this should be the Year of the Suck.  As in Executives that are clearly making bad choices that are costing employees their jobs and still raking in the cash like it’s 1999.

And we have a nice group of them, starting off with the former head of HP, Mark Hurd, who made HP employees pine for the halcyon days of Carly Fiorina.  That takes talent.  Firing him over fudging his expense reports in connection with some shady hanky-panky with a former marketing contractor seemed cheap in some respects, but don’t cry for Marky Mark.  After all, HP’s board then gave him a severance package of forty to fifty million to make sure he wouldn’t sue them.  Then he turned around and was hired by Larry Ellison.  A classic example of failing upward.

Next on the list is Steve Ballmer.  Starts off the year touting tablets at CES.  What’s he doing this upcoming January?  Touting tablets at CES.  How many tablets have been released running Windows this past year?  Right.  It brings to mind the line about how  insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome.   While Apple has taken the money and run, Steve cancelled development on Courier,  the one tablet concept that was different enough to have taken on the other Steve’s  iPad and won.  In the mean time, Microsoft released the Kin, a “smartphone” that was neither all that smart nor much of a phone.  Someone had the good sense to kill it about a month later.  Windows Phone 7 was then released, to a great yawning of the general public.  Not because it wasn’t good – it really is.  The fact is that somewhere along the line, Ballmer and company decided that bold was something that someone else did.  Which is one probable reason why Ray Ozzie finally said “forget this” and left. Right now Microsoft needs boldness.  But instead, Baldo gives it safe bureaucracy.  But hey, why should he care?  He’s getting paid a king’s ransom.

And where would the year be without Carol Bartz?  Laying off five percent of your staff a week before Christmas only epitomizes the tin ear that she has brought to Yahoo.  This only drives home the question “Why did Microsoft think it was a good deal to buy Yahoo in the first place?”  I mean, Jerry Yang was pretty bad, but Carol “the Swear Engine” Bartz seems to be bound and determined to make sure the next group that wants to lay down some coin for Yahoo will be getting it at fire sale prices.  As has been pointed out, Yahoo is sitting on what could easily be their salvation – Flickr – and yet Yahoo is acting as if it is a red headed step-child.  All this, and she’s getting paid 47.2 million this year.  Nice work, if you can get it.

And that’s only three.  When you throw in bank CEO’s that drove the world economy into a ditch, yet still feel they are deserving of muti-million dollar bonuses, “just because”, you really start to wonder.  Kudos to Mark and all the other corporate leaders that are successful in these times; it takes a lot.  But given these times, the spotlight should really have fallen on those who have made it that much worse.  And when I say “Having the spotlight fall on them”, I mean that.  Literally. 

Phase 2: ?

Yahoo executives spoke to journalists at the company’s Sunnyvale, California headquarters this morning about their future plans.  And oh, what plans they are!

They are going to use the next three years to make Yahoo cool again.  Um, guys, I hate to tell you this, but you were never cool to begin with.  You were useful.  You were AOL Lite.  You were Screech.

No, seriously.  That is what they want to do.  So how do they present this new vision?  Let us start with the slide above.  A blackboard with various strategies as parts of a periodic table.  A design element that has been the visual hook for “Breaking Bad’ and at least four commercials over the last three to four years.  Cool does not follow, guys.  Cool leads. 

Next up, the strategies.  The vision is “Bring Personal Meaning to the Web.  The Strategies are as follows: Engage and Delight.  Be where the customer goes.  Personal relevance via Science and Data.  Own real social relationships on the Web.  Build an ecosystem.  Very nice.  Of course, no details about the strategies, how they will work or when we should expect things to be happening.  Just your basic “Collect underpants” portion of the Yahoo world domination show. 

But there was some substance to the meeting.  A vision of what Yahoo mail will look like, which looks like a tarted up version of the current incarnation, only faster with better spam blocking and integration with Facebook and Twitter.  You know, because that’s what the kids are doing these days.  New view of search and an iPad version of Yahoo as well. 

The goal?  I’ll let Michael Arrington field that one:

Those goals, we’ve heard from a source close to Yahoo: an increase in the number of unique visitors to Yahoo properties from today’s 622 million to a cool 1 billion. And an increase in overall Yahoo revenue from last year’s $6.5 billion to a whopping $10 billion.

Doable? Not a chance. Well, maybe on the user number. They grew 9% over the last year in unique users according to Comscore. If they keep that up they’ll be at around 800 million, and I guess they could buy their way to a billion buy buying WordPress, Glam and/or Myspace, each with about 165 million unique monthly visitors. But short of some sort of massively popular new product, 1 billion unique visitors isn’t going to happen.

After all is said and done, it was as expected.  As I said earlier, Yahoo is useful but it is not a leader.  Carol Bartz is not Steve Jobs, no matter how many time she invokes his name.  Yahoo is not Google.  This meeting was about evolution, not revolution.  Yahoo wants to emphasize mobile and pad devices?  Well, yeah.  So does everyone, now that the technology has taken off.  

Yahoo is currently in Phase 1: Collect Underpants.  Someone needs to remind them there is something between Phase 1 and Phase 3: Profit!  And they better figure out what it is and quick.  After all, three years is a long time on the web. 

WordPress Tags: Yahoo!, Underpants Gnomes

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A Birthday Roast! Oh, You Mean It Wasn’t a Roast?

Yahoo! is officially 15 years old, which is like, forever in internet time.  So CNBC hired a comedian to roast the company.  Only two slight problems.  This was no comedian.  It was Yahoo! CEO, Carol Bartz. And she wasn’t funny. 

Note to Yahoo!-To paraphrase Noel Coward “Yahoo!, don’t put your CEO on the stage.”  There’s an old line about acting that once you can fake sincerity, the rest is gravy.  She needs to work on her sincerity, because it sure wasn’t there.  After starting off the interview trashing the government for sending out too much negative news, (just keep thinking those happy thoughts and everything will be OK!), she proceeds to answer questions with all the diplomacy of a drunken sailor in the red light district.  And since this is CNBC, the National Enquirer of the market set, you know there would be some crazy fun afoot. 

1. Would she have sold Yahoo at 36 to Microsoft?  Of course she would have.  Doesn’t really go into any reasons why, just that she would have.  Why didn’t CNBC press her?  Because…
2. Would she sell Yahoo!?  “Absolutely, if the price is right”.  When badgered as to what that price may be, she really backpedaled to little avail.  Come on Carol, that was CNBC’s money shot.  You should have known that they were going to press you like a Panini until you named a price by saying that you’d sell.  The previous question showed their hands.  All you had to do to shut them down was to laugh on question 1, say, “Seeing where the economy is today, if I was to have known that, I definitely would have sold at that point.  But remember guys, I wasn’t anywhere around during that time.”  Then answer question 2 by saying “Great companies don’t sell out in hard times-they find ways to make themselves better and that’s what we’re doing.”
3. Is the stock undervalued?  Of course it is.  She’s right, but there are lots of stocks out there that are undervalued. 
4. Why isn’t Yahoo as big as Google?  Because Google focused on one very profitable thing very well and Yahoo kind of flip flopped around, lost direction, thought they found it, made a number of missteps and here we are.  She actually didn’t say that, but she might as well have. 
5. Why isn’t Yahoo as hot as Facebook?  To which she replies “Remind me, what’s their revenue?"  Catty, for sure. It’s less than 15% of Yahoo’s revenue, on similar US uniques.  But it is growing quite nicely, while Yahoo is not.  Eventually, Carol, those lines cross and maybe sooner than later.  In some ways it sounded like she was in “Heck of a job, Brownie” land.
6. What is Yahoo today?  “Well, it could be a hat, it could be a brooch, it could be a pterodactyl…”  Trust me, that answer would have made more sense than the answer she gave. 

Now, Carol has only been there one year, and Yahoo’s malaise has been years in the making.  And there have been some good changes made under her watch so far. But there are significant challenges ahead, internally and externally.  And it is disconcerting to hear the CEO on TV tout Yahoo’s presence in so many areas, yet sound as if she’s sniffing around for buyers. 

WordPress Tags: Yahoo!, CNBC, Bad Interviews, Business

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