On his blog Jeremy Zawodny poses an open question regarding Yahoo’s malaise:
The less obvious problem is a deeper cultural issue. It’s an institutionalized lack of accountability that makes it easy to blame others (upper management, other product teams, “market forces”, and so on) for things that don’t happen.
Of course you can acquire your way to [...]
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I’m not enthusiastic about flogging this sickly horse; if you guys want to merge your businesses, you know, knock yourselves out.
Both companies should have been taken private years ago so they have some breathing room to reinvent themselves without having to worry about the innovation-killing tyranny of quarterly earnings growth. Maybe a hostile takeover of [...]
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From Yahoo! comes word that a number of popular developer products, including the MyBlogLog APIs as well as Maps and Local APIs, are soon to be shut down.
The announcement is as tone-deaf as it is disingenuous; it starts by saying that Yahoo’s “commitment is unwavering” and then goes on to vaguely enumerate the number of [...]
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I’ve been getting a few pings from folks regarding Yahoo’s plans to transition its Shopping property to a third party. My team at Yahoo launched the Shopping API in August 2005 (although I don’t work for Yahoo anymore so I can’t provide insider answers on what’s going on here).
Since the new partner service (PriceGrabber) apparently [...]
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Link: Yahoo Picks Former Autodesk Chief to Succeed Yang
In a conference call with analysts, [incoming CEO Carol Bartz] acknowledged that Yahoo faced significant challenges but said she believed that the company’s strong brand and market position gave it a “huge opportunity.”
Ms. Bartz also delivered some of the colorful rhetoric she has become known for. “I [...]
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People have been talking over the weekend about the failed Microsoft/Yahoo takeover talks. As a Yahoo shareholder and former employee I’m disappointed that it’s going to be quite some time before we get our money out of that stock (note to self: in the future, always sell ESPP shares the day you leave). I empathize [...]
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Link: Announcing the OpenSocial Foundation
Banding together to make a half-dozen social networks interoperable is not the same as having critical mass. It is the equivalent of having fifteen women band together to give birth to a child.
Also, creating a nonprofit foundation to manage your endeavor does not automatically make you equivalent to Firefox.
Cheers. I’m always [...]
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To hear the New York Times’ John Markoff and Matt Richtel describe it in their largely fact-free story on the technical integration that Yahoo! and Microsoft will need to do if the merger goes through, you’d think that a Yahoo-Microsoft integration will amount to a cleaning of the Aegean stables.
The writers did take the time [...]
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Zend and Microsoft have done a lot of work in the last year to make PHP run well on Windows. I never understood why Microsoft devoted resources to that, but now it is clear: it’s going to make technical integration between the two organizations go much more smoothly.
This will hopefully be the death knell of [...]
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My wife (who, like me, used to work for Yahoo!) rolled her eyes this morning when I told her about the Microsoft offer. We used to excitedly hear rumors of this kind of thing every three to six months but they were only rumors. Now it’s the real deal, and I have to say, I’m [...]
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