On Yahoo’s 11th Hour

The Yahoo implosion is continuing at an alarming pace since Bartz was canned last night. What’s sad is that for many people, is that Yahoo was their first port of call on this long and interesting path to where we are now on the web. It’s directory was once a touchstone for a generation of web users. How many of use still use our first Yahoo mailboxes? It’s still got a touch of the warm and fuzz for me.

A lot of the problems I see Yahoo making over and over again stem from its failure to really embrace the spirit of its failed Brickhouse project and give levity and space to its engineers to invent. Yahoo aren’t the only company making this mistake.

Brickhousing
On establishment, Brickhouse was shaped to be a pocket monster of an invention studio. Set in the startup hub of central SF, its mission was to recapture the startup vibe in Yahoo. While it produced some interesting projects like Fire Eagle, it was for all intents and purposes, a phantom limb for nurturing innovation in Yahoo proper.

There seemed to be a lot of problems that stunted Brickhouse’s impact. Not being on the main campus was a massive problem. Not just for the Brickhouse imagineers feeling the beat of the HQ, but also for reinvesting that innovation and reenergising the body of Yahoo. It’s difficult to motivate people at the coalface of an organisation working on the mundane but shipping parts of a site, when you’ve created a special hip beast in central SF and annointed them as the engine of the org’s R&D effort going forward. Who wants to be shipping yesterday’s software?

Revolving Chiefs, Revolving Goals

Leadership was going in circles. A lot of tech vets ran through the doors of Brickhouse – Salim Ismail (now at Singularity U), Chad Dickerson (now head of Etsy), Caterina Fake (Flickr, Hunch). It all seems a bit chicken and egg. No doubt the exec bounce rate was inextricably linked to Yahoo’s existential crisis. A crisis completely characterised by the infamous Peanut Butter Manifesto written by the former SVP Brad Garlinghouse in 2006 just as the Brickhouse was was finding its feet. A crisis that included Yahoo buying Zimbra in 2007 for $350m, a company who’s mailbox architecture was seen by Yahoo as an undoubted opening salvo against Google Apps dominance

The acquisition of Zimbra will help Yahoo! to expand its presence in universities, businesses and through ISPs by enabling organizations to host e-mail on or off premises with their own domain.

Zimbra was then punted to VMware less than three years later, with Yahoo still committed to using its technology for its mail and calendar products. A double-whammy. Yahoo basically said we don’t want to architect Zimbra’s IP, but because of dependancies with our architecture, we’ll be at the mercy of your decision-making, Mr VMware. Basically.

It’s damn clear that rebellion was ricocheting at lots of levels of Yahoo – the manifesto, execs and key product people leaving. The effect was astounding. Acquisitions were bolted on hap-hazardly. Partnerships on roads to nowhere inked – search deals with Samsung and RIM etc while the iPhone quietly hoovered up marketshare.

But all of that is now in the past. Or is it? There’s a lot of commentary on the web saying that Yahoo needs to embrace its present company DNA and just decide it’s a media organisation rather than a technology company. Yahoo, the media org is at first-glance is an easier value proposition to understand. It has properties to drive – Yahoo! Finance and Mail are still well eyeballed but I fail to see the impetus to reinvent these properties if Yahoo decides just to be a media company. Yes, media organisations like the Guardian do very well – thank you very much. But Yahoo will never be the Guardian. And it probably shouldn’t try to be.

And stirrings of the impending sale of Yahoo shouldn’t come as a surprise. Packaging the whole company. If I’ve learned anything from Pretty Woman it’s that selling off a company in well-rounded units rather than a confusing maw of properties makes sense. Which is why I am intrigued to read reports of possible sale of the company is on the cards. Maybe going private is what needs to happen, but a private monster is still a monster.

September 7th, 2011 at 12:13 pm • Filed in Geekery



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