Boom Is Lowered Gently on Yahoo
October 20, 2008
Kara Swisher lowers the boom on Yahoo gently in “What Yahoo’s Looming Costs Cuts Actually Mean (Not as Many Layoffs as You Think), which appeared on October 17, 2008. The hook for the write up is Yahoo’s firing people. I won’t cite a number because whatever that number is it won’t mean as many as I think. With regards to Yahoo, I don’t think much about layoffs. These are inevitable, and regardless of what the company will do in the next three or four months, Yahoo’s sitting on a cost time bomb. Nuking employees won’t do much. If you are a believer in Yahoo, you will enjoy the new announcements cogently summarized by ReadWriteWeb here.
Here’s what my research has turned up.
Yahoo has numerous search systems, search licenses, search initiatives, and search technologies. Today it is desirable to have a less heterogeneous technical sandbox. Not at Yahoo. Overture has a primitive search system, which I could no longer find on the redesigned Yahoo site. No problem because traffic for Yahoo advertising seems to be stable or gently undulating like long slow waves in the moonlight. There are two “flavors” of email and search delivered from the Stata Labs acquisition. No problem. Since the acquisition of Stata Labs, I can find email in the Yahoo system. There’s the Web search. Again no problem it is neither better or worse than Google’s Web search but Google has carried the day for now. There’s Flickr search. There’s other search systems kicking around. One reader reminded me that Yahoo’s real shopping search is Kelkoo. More information here. You could fiddle with the InQuira powered help search system until recently. I like using it to locate “cancel service”. Give Help a whirl here. For a laugh look at this attempt to “improve” Yahoo help.
If I am happy with these different search systems in general, why do I think collectively these very same systems are Yahoo’s cost time bomb. Three reasons:
- It costs money to maintain different systems. Staff, consultants, hardware. The more an organization has, the more it must spend for information technology.
- Heterogeneous systems means staff are not easily interchangeable. This means that Yahoo has to either hire more consultants or live with hacks that may operate like small roadside improvised explosive devices. Yahoo doesn’t know when a fix is going to create a problem elsewhere. These are unbudgeted fixes until one goes pop. CFOs don’t like this type of pop.
- Adding a new feature or function means that Yahoo either has to pick a horse to ride, thus keeping other systems in a position of imposed obsolescence or find a wizard who can produce a fix that works across heterogeneous systems. If this path is followed, see item 2 above.
Yahoo is busy creating new, new things. The hard fact for Yahoo is that much of the underpinnings are old, old things. You don’t fix these problems by firing people. You fix these problems by facing the reality of the infrastructure and making even more difficult decisions about technology, actions, and services. Firing people is expedient, and it will grease the skids for whatever Yahoo’s current pet consultant company recommends. But these steps, like Ms. Swisher’s analysis, lowers the boom gently on a ship that is struggling with flawed engineering. The ship, gently reader, she is not sea worthy.
Stephen Arnold, October 21, 2008
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Yahoo is actually not using InQuira any more for help search, or for any search on their site, for that matter.The search results are coming from Yahoo’s search product now.