Tag Archives for Yahoo
Scott Thompson begins his job at Yahoo! today.
Image via CrunchBase
It seems that most of the mainstream press is befuddled about him and exactly what business Yahoo! is trying to be. Is it a media company? Is it a bulletin boards company? Advertising? Mobile? Marketing? No, not search.
It is a company that has a rapidly scalable identity and a huge community of users that it can rapid test ideas on, as it builds off what it used to be and turns into the next big thing.
This makes Yahoo! just like a start-up, and Thompson just like a budding entrepreneur, except he has skillz. Let me boldly proclaim that Thompson’s role as CEO at Yahoo! will move the company in the direction of social, community-centric e-commerce solutions. Watch out, Jack Ma, Yahoo! is coming for you!
Yahoo! is going to become the first huge scale media content company that is actually an e-commerce company. Think of it as a giant tupperware party where content and e-commerce are mashed together to form a new type of selling content, or a live advertising model where product, seller, consumer, and community are all mashed up into one.
Wal-Mart, but with a huge media engine.
Image via Wikipedia
Matthew Ingram at GigaOm has a great article about what he thinks Yahoo! should be doing. Namely, founder Jerry Yang could get behind his own private equity buyout of Yahoo!. The commentary in the comments section seems to lean on Yang’s need to bring a visionary onboard with a number 2 financial operative and kick some life into the company.
Or, Yang should jump ship, and set about becoming a mentor to entrepreneurs.
What’s your take? Here’s a carving out of some of Ingram’s pretty astute points:
But is there a case to be made for Yahoo remaining a standalone company? Possibly. Yangsays that he believes Yahoo is “the premier digital media company” — which seems like a bit of a stretch when you look at other potential bidders for that title, such as Apple and Amazon. But at least it’s a relatively straightforward and quantifiable goal, as opposed to some of the other ways in which Yahoo has defined itself over the years, which have been all over the map strategy-wise. What if Yang had the ability to focus more clearly on that goal and streamline the company to achieve it?
