Kindle Review – Kindle 2 Review, Books

My flatmate said something really interesting regarding Yahoo- If a tech firm has to bring in a business consulting firm to advise them on corporate restructuring it shows how ridiculously out of touch with reality they’ve become.

I use my Yahoo Mail account, and use Yahoo Finance. I’m impressed by the new Yahoo initiative where they’re opening up their APIs and platform to developers via Yahoo Social APIs. I’ve played around with Yahoo Pipes and liked it  (although it is a really unpretty looking tool). I’ve begun to consider using YUI instead of Scriptalicious (went with JQuery). They bought  flickr for $35 or so million. They get 124 million uique visitors a month in the US (quantcast). They’re (based on who you ask) the #1 or #2 traffic website in the world.

And yet Yahoo is floundering – terribly. The stock price makes Microsoft’s offer seem like a dream. They keep losing market share in search. Panama – the new ad platform that was supposed to lead to a resurrection has made no discernible difference.

Basically, Yahoo is at a point where there are only two outcomes -

1. Microsoft buys them. Google can’t because of anti-trust issues. And very rightly so.  
2. They find a saviour – they need someone with vision and courage. A few people come to mind – Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs. Bezos would do too. In fact, Bezos would do very well (something we’ll come to in a minute or two). Ballmer – except he’s at MSFT. Ditto Ray Ozzie. Either of the Google guys. Mark Cuban – mostly, because his competitiveness and energy is exactly what a company like Yahoo needs.

More about the Saviour Solution.

Yahoo is at the very end of a huge war – a war that it has undeniably lost, and a war that might very well kill it. Even though it has been thoroughly beaten by Google, Yahoo should not acquiesce to the Google search deal. Where is their pride? Google took you down, and now you want to let them take over your most valuable resources – search, mail, all your customers.

For Yahoo losing this war is a huge setback – however, it doesn’t have to be the end.

A Saviour would look at a company that has

1. The 2nd biggest online presence after Google. Including lots of very valuable components.
2. A foundation for a social network and a social graph that would dwarf the existing ones.
3. The opportunity to reset the DNA of the company – keep the best parts, and lose the extraneous ones.
4. Lots of undecided and new battlefields – mobile, international, the social grid.

All that Yahoo needs (albeit a huge ask) is to reset expectations, come up with a new independent plan and execute on it.  And that’s why I feel Jeff Bezos and/or Mark Cuban would be ideal because both of them possess the three key ingredients -

1. The vision to define a 10 year plan.  
2. The courage to stick to it without caring about what people who do not care about Yahoo think. 
3. The ability to execute on it.

I’m sure I’m missing a lot of people. Jerry Yang is not a leader. Larry Ellison could do it. Marc Benioff could. Yahoo – where’s the fighting spirit? As a company you still have some of the most valuable pieces of the internet and online pie. Why is there so much panic and confusion – why is your CEO/acting CEO making a fool of himself and the company?

I think it all comes down to having balls and fire and not giving up. Yahoo needs to find someone with those qualities, and hand over the reins of the company to him, and reset expectations to a 10 year revival time period.

It’s just pathetic how a once mighty company has become a joke. And it’s created the opportunity for someone to muster up 20 billion or so and perform a miracle reminiscent of Steve Jobs’ 2nd term at Apple.