What would you do if you were Yahoo's new CEO? » YugaTech

What would you do if you were Yahoo’s new CEO?

News from last week was that Carol Bartz was fired from Yahoo! and she’s like the 4th person to leave the company as CEO in the last 4 years. The search for a new CEO has begun but let’s all play with the idea that we’re in-charge of Yahoo!

What would you do if you were Yahoo’s new CEO? Here’s my two cents and feel free to add yours or chime in by leaving a comment or two:

Focus on Content. Great Content. Make Yahoo! the single best destination by everyone, not for anything else but for content.
Forget Search. It’s a losing battle against Google and we all knew that years ago. Sell the search component to Microsoft or get back into that partnership with Google they had about a decade ago. Why compete against Google for link-pointing when you can be that link that Google points to?
Get more editorial talent. I know it’s hard to find new engineering talent with FB, Twitter, and Google taking them all in, but there’s plenty of editorial talent out there (especially the independent ones).
Champion UGC (as in, user-generated content). Yahoo’s pretty good at it with Flickr, Groups, Answers. They just need to add more community managers to shepherd the flock and expand the niche. It’s sad they had to buy or develop really cool UGC properties only to let them die later (remember del.icio.us, Buzz and MyBlogLog).
Go shop for more cool sites/products. Jason Calacanis has 10 in his shopping list and though I don’t agree with all of them, I liked TWiT, GDGT, Gawker and FlipBoard. I would also add PerezHilton into the bunch. I’d gladly put back Yahoo as my homepage if they had Gizmodo, GDGT and TWiT fully customized into the front page.
Go deeper, local. This is especially true in most of Asia. Grab a local site, with a local flavor as Yahoo’s flag carrier for each country. They got Koprol in Indonesia. Maybe it’s Sulit.com.ph for the Philippines and Mudah.my in Malaysia.
Go mobile. Apps, apps, apps. FlipBoard-style.

Yahoo! need to become the portal it used to be and not be ashamed of being called one. They’re really good at display advertising so they should keep at it and let the great talent pump in millions of eyeballs for the properties.

Abe Olandres

Abe is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of YugaTech with over 20 years of experience in the technology industry. He is one of the pioneers of blogging in the country and considered by many as the Father of Tech Blogging in the Philippines. He is also a technology consultant, a tech columnist with several national publications, resource speaker and mentor/advisor to several start-up companies.

https://www.yugatech.com

18 Comments

Jad Villanueva says:

14 years ago

I do agree on the content, localization as well as dropping the search engine. however are contents and localization financially feasible? Im not sure about this but it needs more than great management to handle all contents locally to be stable in terms of financials.
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jhoeforth says:

14 years ago

I would agree on the first three bullets, disagree on the next two and partially agree on the last items. Yahoo lost its way for too long. Heck, they don’t even know what exactly they want to do. They need laser-like FOCUS on their few remaining good products (Messenger, Flickr, Mail). They (still) have massive user base on these products. From here, they can increase their mind share by innovating and re-capturing their loyal user’s interest.
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Iyan Sommerset says:

14 years ago

I’d say focus on the stuff that I (and I bet a lot of other people) still use – Mail, Messenger and News. I still prefer Y!Mail and Messenger to the alternatives and Y!news is still better than iGoogle imho. Honestly, I’d prefer they resurrect Geocities with a more-focused, non-blog-centered, webspace-providing service.
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Jonha (@jonharules) says:

14 years ago

Content and Local. Yahoo doesn’t need to focus in a lot of projects to try and beat Google because they’re a media company, not a Search Engine mogul.

Accept that Yahoo, before Mashable throws you out of the ring. When people try to rank well for Google SERP, people would always say, “Content is King” and you are right about Yahoo needs to really focus on creating FRESH and high quality content that makes people go there everyday.

Don’t create/acquire new products that will eventually be abandoned. Focus on improving the existing ones (Flickr, Answers, Finance), and please note that all of the improvements and increase in price share/sales will happen overnight. Isa isa lang. But the key is to determine and really decide on which ones. Once decided, stick to it.
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jonaflormicfren says:

14 years ago

Yahoo was known for his email address, and we all know that the close rival of yahoo is google. Google is trying get the lead from yahoo for being the number one email provider, and the side of yahoo, they are also trying to catch the lead from google for being the number one search engine.
So being the CEO, i would focus more on email and news, find more ways for being accessible to user.
Give the company demand, and do the job better.
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jorussic says:

14 years ago

Hire Steve Jobs.
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garz says:

14 years ago

I would improve the quality of yahoo! videos. Or maybe an OS that could compete with Android and iOS and does not hog too much battery power.
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Steve Jobs says:

14 years ago

If I were the new CEO of Yahoo!, the first thing I’d do is kill myself for not having been accepted as the CEO of Google.
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Quobetah says:

14 years ago

If I were new Yahoo CEO, Id hire an entire new team of HTML website devs, and revamp my site’s look to be fresh ala Flipboard and self adjusting when viewed on a desktop, tablet or smartphone. Ill focus on strengthening my strong products like Flickr, Mail, Messenger and News! They should be the star on my portal. They should be the Flipboard of desktop, a default homepage that conforms to your interests and point you to web contents that you’ll be interested to click in and make money from that. Its like the prettier google. There.
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Aj Banda says:

14 years ago

Why compete against Google for link-pointing when you can be that link that Google points to?

–> this is a great marketing strategy.. keep your enemies closer.. they might get you on top. :)
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