The New York Times’ Saul Hansell has this piece today (with a great headline…”Yahoo Feels Breath on Neck”) about Yahoo!’s fall from the comfortable Internet perch it enjoyed as recently as a year ago.
Yahoo! lost out to Google in its bid for YouTube in part because it was slow and, well, corporate-like in its approach to the jack rabbit video sharing site. Yahoo is a huge Internet company that deliver lots of eyeballs to advertisers, but its size and diversity may be the problem.
Yahoo may well be slipping because of the sheer scope of its ambitions. It competes in news with CNN, in sports with ESPN, in e-mail with Microsoft, in instant messaging with AOL, in social networking with MySpace, and of course in searching with Google. And it does so in dozens of countries.
“It’s hard to figure out what they want to be when they grow up, even though they are grown up now,” said Tim Hanlon, a senior vice president of Denuo, the media futures consulting arm of the Publicis Groupe. “Are they a content company? Are they a services company? Or are they a portal to other things? You ask three people and you may get three different answers.”
Moreover, the company is very slow to cut deals and seize the day and is what Jefferies & Company analyst Youssef H. Squali calls a “stodgy old Internet company.” The fact that it has been so slow to move into video advertising is testament to this big bureaucratic company mentality.
This new critique of Yahoo! stands in contrast to the glowing reviews of the company two or three years ago when CEO Terry Semel was highly praised for his sharp management of the formerly languishing Internet giant. And Semel is a savvy executive. It’s just that the pendulum has swung away from old-school. business management, much needed in the dot.com bust era, and back to entrepreneurial risk-taking (although nothing like the craziness of the dot.com era…we’re not in another bubble, but that’s another subject).
The race now belongs to the swiftest and it’s hard to run when your company is bogged down by internal turf-battles, decisions by committee, executives preening for promotions by managing up and all the other baggage that comes with being a big, established company.
Cynthia Brumfield at 8:04 AM|Comments(0)
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