Digital Common Sense

That’s probably not a fair question, but let me step back a moment. You might want to take a look at two earlier posts I wrote -

Yoohoo Yahoo. Where are you?
Hey Yahoo - Knock, knock. Is anyone home?

They were posts moitivated, at least in part, by comments from friend and colleague Stuart Henshall. I link to his comments in both.

Stuart and I were sharing observations about Jerry Yang at Yahoo and his plan to spend 100 days in silent reflection within Yahoo to sort out their plan of attack. Now it’s perhaps time to reflect on the outcome.

First, 100 days was far too long. In Internet time, that’s the life of some companies. To think time would stand still for Yahoo to spend 100 days contemplating its navel was ludicrous. Secondly, we’ve gone well beyond 100 days. Laughably beyond.

In the time that’s passed, now we hear rumblings of layoffs at Yahoo. I don’t have any direct confirmation, but certainly there are a lot of rumblings. And I have enough connections who work at Yahoo that the barometer shows there’s a climate of change sweeping in, but it seems mostly unknown. I get the feeling that for many Yahooligans,, they’re like mushrooms - being fed manure and kept in the dark. That’s just a sense I get from casual conversation.

In one of my earlier posts, I aimed this comment at  Jerry Yang:

I hope while you’re radio silent you’re talking with and listening to
people like Jeff Bonforte and Daniel Raffel and not just talking in an
echo chamber. If you’re staring into the abyss with a deer in the
headlights look, please don’t let the great people at Yahoo all ride
that train until it derails. I hope you aren’t doing all the talking
and failing to listen to the people who made Yahoo what it was. Because
it can be again, but not if you fail to act.

From the outrsiders perspective, when Yahoo went radio silent, they went comatose. They’ve failed to act, failed to plan, failed to think. None of those may be true. What they’ve really failed to do is provide a clue. They’re pretty much stuck in radio silence.

When you’re a company like Yahoo, competing with the likes of Google and Facebook silence isn’t a weapon. It isn’t a defense. It surely isn’t an attack. Silence is tantamount to cowering in fear.

I said Yang could revitalize Yahoo by talking and listening to the right people, but it’s something that had to be done in a timely manners.

The question in my mind now is whether or not Yahoo has any relevance at all. Is there enough left to salvage and maintain some degree of leadership. For me personally, I’ve realized that I use my Yahoo ID for one thing and only one thing. It’s my Flickr identity. If not for FLickr, Yahoo wouldn’t exist on my personal radar.

So here’s a question for you  - do you Yahoo? How and why? What is it you use Yahoo for these days. And if you don’t use it at all, I’d like to know that too. I can identify a number of things most of us don’t use Yahoo for -

• It’s not the search engine of choice. Google has that.
• It’s not the social network of choice. Facebook seems to have that, although I wouldn’t discount MySpace just yet either.
• It’s not the IM chat medium of choice. With Gtalk, AIM, MSN and Jabber, the real leader is probably a cross-platform tool that let’s us chat on multiple networks. If we’re talking pure messaging chatter, I don’t think we can discount either Twitter or Jaiku.
• It’s not the video tool of choice. Sure lots of people used Yahoo video, but I think Skype has actually overtaken it, and SightSpeed has a continually growing use base.
• It’s not the default home page. My Yahoo just isn’t. The most common home pages I see are Google, MSN, news or sports pages. I can’t remember the last time I saw Yahoo come up as anyones default home page.

If we don’t live in Yahoo, and we aren’t using Yahoo, how sustainable is it? And frankly, what the heck is Jerry Yang doing about it?

As an interesting comparison, there’s been a lot of talk about the senior leadership team at Skype and what’s been going on over there. Is Yahoo as interesting as Skype in terms of what lies ahead? Not in my book. And not if you read the chatter on the web.

Yahoo has lost relevance and is still in decline. The question for me is whether Yahoo is sliding into the abyss or will be able to pull out and salvage a respectable leadership role in any segment. Or will we simply write them off as another also-ran?

Technorati Tags: Yahoo, relevance, Jarry Yang

Filed by Ken at 10:37 pm under Tech in General, Technology, Unified Communications