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January 30, 2008
- Yikes! Or Yahoo!
Note to all Readers: I am not an insider and no one of substance to my knowledge is listening to me.
For my unregular readers, I want to remind you that I am not a Google evangelist. And since the days of Brad Park managing to break the IM monopoly I have been a Yahoo! fan. So the Yahoo! earnings and layoff announcements does not make me happy.
So if I were Jerry Yang, here are the questions I would be thinking.
1) I am shucking everything with no growth, but are any of these something I should be sending to VC friends to help in my battle with Google. Afterall, the Internet’s major contribution is the death by a thousand cuts model. And anything that helps attack Google is a benefit to me at this point. Outsourcing competition is a good strategy.
2) Can I make my local market strategy with newspapers more valuable. They are my channel, but their websites are not as strong with Yahoo as they can be. Can the Job Listings, turn into a local advertising. Is it possible to make a Adwords /AdSense service that supports growth. Is there a Soccer Mom social network to be had in that channel?
3) If there is nothing there, should I run an Oracle strategy and acquire my growth. Yahoo’s market cap is strong enough that I could acquire some smokestacks that will make my content more valuable. Companies like McGraw Hill, Idearc, RR Donnelly are targets that would get a lot of respect from those of us who are not NetHeads.
4) My old friends at Softbank and their Ali Baba solution. Should I be working to create a US channel strategy for them. Microsoft and I have been talking for ages. Is their something there that makes a major shift in my strategy.
Finally, Wall Street is to distracted by larger factors, so a slow and steady strategy will be respected.
Posted by carl at January 30, 2008 08:49 AM