![]() Somehow get them to view Yahoo as a place where they can make a difference and achieve their own success. Talking to Wolf crystallized my own thinking, which led to this column.īut in my view the issue for Yahoo isn't only its ability to attract developers to employ, but its ability to appeal to the larger community of people who build software - to When you have a longtime content expert saying things like that, you know the world has changed. Valley that he didn't care about software. But basically Terry sent the signal to Silicon They need developers in order to compete with Google. It's become a place where the best software developers don't want to work. Says Michael Wolf, the longtime media industry consultant at McKinsey and Booz Allen who recently had a stint at MTV: "The real mistake Terry made was he focused on content. These, like Yahoo, are companies that aim to offer a free software-infused content product and make their money by selling advertising. Technology-rich social networking environment, smaller more flexible portals like Netvibes that compete with MyYahoo, Joost for TV distribution over the Web, and many others. Is the textbook example, but I would include Facebook for its Meanwhile, Semel leaned heavily on what he'd learned in Hollywood and got all excited about Yahoo producing its own content.īut while Yahoo was getting better at selling advertising and trying to create content, other more nimble companies were getting better at using software. He revamped Yahoo's sales organization and corporate structure and took the company successfully out of the doldrums of the dotcom bust,īoosting its stock up from around $5 to around $27.50 by Monday, when he resigned as CEO and became the non-executive chairman of the board. The company may have lots of users on Yahoo mail, for instance, but its technology has not improved. Yahoo's main problem, it seems to me, is that under Semel's leadership the fundamental truth that software would be the differentiator was forgotten, or at least played secondįiddle. Yet those two things that draw me back to Yahoo every day are works of software. Your humble columnist, for example, still relies heavily on his MyYahoo page. Large audience and instilling amazing loyalty in its viewers, readers and users. It succeeded early at aggregating a uniquely It may sound ironic to assert it is not tech-focused enough. But Yahoo was without question the first new media company of the Internet.
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