New Yahoo! CEO Asks For Time To Inspect The Ship

There’s been a lot of head scratching at Yahoo! lately. It hasn’t done very well at all relative to its five-hundred-dollar-per-share nemesis, Google. Definitely not the best sales pitch to present to investors. It seemingly has spent more acquiring successes than make its own. (Google is out shopping as well, but they seem to be tacking buys from the outside onto stuff it’s already created on the inside, at least for the most part.) And after quite a long and strangely uneventful run, Terry Semel, formerly a head honcho of the media world, relinquished his throne to Jerry Yang, a cofounder of the company.

It’s completely understandable why Semel was picked for the job way back when. He had media credentials, and, well, it seemed like media was becoming a more popular commodity on the Web by the day. If Semel were to have joined the gang as Web 2.0 came about rather than years before, it’s subsequent forecast might have been full of sunshine, considering the success of sites like YouTube, etc.

Well, actually, I take that back. The fact that Yahoo! under Semel didn’t snatch YouTube (or any other quality video host for that matter) while it was still on the market is Yahoo!’s former CEO showing he’s in fact double the fool, having jumped the gun the first time around and having willfully ignored the dollar signs the second.

Anywho, you get the point. Now, the company needs to rethink quite a bit – perhaps even so much as reinvent in order to remain relevant. I know, it’s almost like I’m alluding to doomsday if it doesn’t see it’s current status as anything less than one steeped in crisis. But really, it’s just not looking very good, and I wholeheartedly believe it needs big jolts of energy, one after the other, if it’s to give Larry and Sergey a reason to take notice of it’s existence again. At the moment, Yahoo! probably doesn’t worry Big G a bit. That has to change. Well, that is if Yahoo! wants to be Yahoo! again. If not, by all means stay the course, Mr Yang.

Change will occur. Jerry will make sure of it. Though he’ll be loaded with green regardless of where his company ends up, I doubt he’d like to see it fall down any further.

But changing things up sooner rather than later would make everyone rooting for #2 quite happy, the stockholders especially. Alas, it’ll take time, Yang has told the world. (Not in those exact words, but when a new CEO asks everyone watching the ship to give him 100 days to review the business as a whole, you get the impression that it won’t be springing back to action in a few months’ time.)

He’s certainly playing the part of realist in this situation. He’s giving himself ample time to make the rounds and cut where he needs to cut (I presume a good number of employees will be let go in the near future). That’s normal. It’s bloated. It needs to be fit. It needs to lose some weight.

I do hope – at least in order to maintain some good graces - that the new man at the top will at least update everyone below (and all of us, of course) regularly about his plans as they’re formulated. I’m sure he will. 100 days of silence would be…well, lets not go there.

What do I personally wish for him to do with the company? Unify it all. Way more than it is at present. Yahoo!’s sites are clearly identifiable as Yahoo!, but they aren’t tied as closely together as I would like. I don’t in any way want to imply I want everything mashed together. Not at all. I just wish all aspects of the portal and its various utilities were more connected. If that were the case, I think more people would use more of it. Some might even use Yahoo! Search again. Imagine that.

I’d also like the company to be more adventurous. And open. I’m sure both those things to be characteristics common throughout Yahoo!.

They can do it. With a clear direction and controlled leadership, it’s definitely possible. Some might even say probably. But it won’t be easy. Then again, success on the Web today shouldn’t be easy to attain in the first place. The harder things are, the better the good stuff gets. Yahoo! could surely use some bettering, don’t you think?