Brad Garlinghouse, a Senior Vice-President at Yahoo, had his internal memo published on the Wall Street Journal yesterday. This memo effectively admits defeat in the short term, and explains what Yahoo has to do in order to get it’s house in order, from Garlinghouse’s position. Here is a quick overview (read the WSJ article for a more detailed explanation).
Recognizing Our Problems
We lack a focused, cohesive vision for our company. We want to do everything and be everything — to everyone. We’ve known this for years, talk about it incessantly, but do nothing to fundamentally address it. We are scared to be left out. We are reactive instead of charting an unwavering course. We are separated into silos that far too frequently don’t talk to each other. And when we do talk, it isn’t to collaborate on a clearly focused strategy, but rather to argue and fight about ownership, strategies and tactics.
Our inclination and proclivity to repeatedly hire leaders from outside the company results in disparate visions of what winning looks like — rather than a leadership team rallying around a single cohesive strategy.
I’ve heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular.
I hate peanut butter. We all should.
We lack clarity of ownership and accountability.
We lack decisiveness.
We end up with competing (or redundant) initiatives and synergistic opportunities living in the different silos of our company.
• YME vs. Musicmatch • Flickr vs. Photos • YMG video vs. Search video • Deli.cio.us vs. myweb • Messenger and plug-ins vs. Sidebar and widgets • Social media vs. 360 and Groups • Front page vs. YMG • Global strategy from BU’vs. Global strategy from Int’lThe Solution:
1. Focus the vision
2. Restore accountability and clarity of ownership
3. Execute a radical reorganization
4. Blow up the matrix.
5. Kill the redundancies.
Jeremy Zawodny, another Yahoo veteran, offers a slightly different view. He agrees and disagrees at the same time, as posted on his blog.
I think, all things considered, that Brad is probably quite right - the overlaps and inefficiencies around having multiple products serving the same markets is shocking, to say the least. Yahoo should look to acquire the right companies, sell off the wrong divisions, and focus on building out what I think is already a fantastic platform business - and not just competing with Google on search, but also by leveraging what Jeremy Z and his team have done over at the API side of Yahoo. This is the future of the Semantic Web - we know, because we’re in the thick of it with Synthasite, a product that is arguably ahead of it’s time.
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