Yahoo: A Partial Catalog of Errors
December 8, 2015
I read “7 of Yahoo’s Biggest **** Ups.” Just seven? With the smell of blood in the air on Wall Street, the jibes on talking head TV, and the endless write ups about the Yahoo Board’s dithering, a catalog of Yahoo’s seven biggest failures seems timely.
What are the mistakes? Here you go:
- Not buying Google
- Not buying Facebook
- Not selling itself to Microsoft
- The Flickr flop
- Not thinking as a technology outfit
- The Tumblr tumble
- Disorganization in the reorganizations.
I have prepared several analyses of the Yahooligans over the years. I once had an illustration for a PowerPoint presentation which showed the Titanic and Terry Semel as the captain. I wish I could find that deck.
There are a couple of points in my list of purple vulnerabilities; for example, the settlement with the Google for the alleged, possible missteps regarding the GoTo, Overture, Yahoo advertising systems was an important milestone. I think that error in judgment was the action that turned on the flashing yellow lights for Yahoo. Yahoo settled a legal matter and took some money. Google then pranced toward its $60 plus billion in revenue dervived mostly from online advertising.
I also noted in my analyses the technical hubris at Yahoo. The company talked a good game and some of the Yahooligans published articles explaining whizzy technology type things. But the company fumbled not one or two technical opportunities. The company has been for a long time essentially a marketing yodler. Yodels are interesting, but yodels do not turn half baked ideas into revenue. The technology matters, not the wild notions.
Poor Yahoo. Its trajectory presages what will happen to a number of other outfits who take their eye off the technology-that-matters ball as it whizzes towards the batter’s head.
Stephen E Arnold, December 8, 2015
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