The question of the day is, how could Yahoo improve? Every company no matter how big or small has room and opportunity for improvement. In Yahoo’s situation, they once stood king of the hill, only to be pushed down by Google. Just this week, Yahoo stock hit a three-year low, the lowest since 2004. Coincidently this week, Yahoo’s new President, Susan Decker purchased $1.1 million worth of company shares. According to InsiderScore analysts, this makes her purchase the largest by any “Yahoo insider in more than four years.”
So now this leaves me wondering, does Decker know something that we don’t? Maybe she’s got plans that will help Yahoo compete with Google? Or, maybe she was just trying to help give Yahoo stock a boost? Afterall, following her purchase, Yahoo shares have gone up about 3.2 percent. There’s gotta be a reason for her purchase, and if it’s because she’s got a trick up her sleeve to improve Yahoo, whether you love or hate Google, what do you think? Yahoo could improve by…?
Source: CNN Money
Yahoo could improve by
-getting rid of their paid e-mail service
-making a less cluttered homepage
-having better customer service and help options (not just an FAQ)
-buying Google
Firstly, I’m not sure there is anything wrong with Yahoo except it’s stock price which I’m personally vulture trading (they are public so shareholders demand a new CEO etc.):
1) Unified properties (bring together Web 2.0 stuff under one hood).
2) Purchasing StumbleUpon, extending it to include RSS feeds, Images, Videos etc. and integrating it into their one hood philosophy to find more Yahoo!.
3) Corporate Sales Teams to compete for new high value advertising deals in Yahoo Panama (i.e., Video advertising). Leverage the general media hatred for GooTube to become the media advertising platform of choice.
4) Yahoo Search Appliance (blatantly copy Google) so corporations take them more seriously.
5) Extend Brand Universe to deliver pattered multimedia advertisements (games, funky flash sites etc).
6) Significantly reduce advertising rates for advertisers in the “Google Adwords Ad Category” to reach critical / mass and become competative with Google’s distributed dominance in the fabric of the internet (i.e., charge nothing for Yahoo Words). Yahoo makes a lot more money than Google in the non-advertising front so use that as the cash cow and run lean in the ad space exploiting the long tail (lol buzz word marathon). If Google counters with reduced advertising rates for advertisers their profit will plumit. Investors may/will relate this to risk in their annual report and the stock value will tumble (hopefully not leading to another stock market melt down).
6) Increase reporting infrastructure behind Panama and offer paid Consulting Services for customers wanting more in depth search analysis (including optimizing for all the big vendors).
7) Be purchased by Microsoft and leverage Microsoft’s Frameworks with Yahoo!’s services and become MicroYahooSuperSoft.
Personally I don’t even see any reason for Yahoo to try to compete with Google. They would need to change too much stuff.
Personally, to improve:
- ditch a lot of their crap
- ditch the search engine (I mean seriously, who uses anything but Google?)
- keep improving the music section, which is actually one thing that they kick Google’s ass with, IMO.
I just realized I said personally too many times….
yahoo should buy some google stock
First off it’s impossible to beat Google, I think that it’s too late, but what they can do is focus on a couple of things and do them very well
I.E. There music search
And yes I am a huge Google fanboy1
Updating their services consistently, i.e. their mail platform is arguably the best on the web, but their ‘Briefcase’ reminds me of ‘Windows 3.1′
Yahoo Widgets is fantastic – Yahoo Messenger, needs work.
Where’s that new Vista Messenger version they promised what-feels-like a year ago now?
Consistency is so hard for companies to grasp these days. It hurts their bottom line, but they don’t realise that.
…releasing all new services, and updating old ones, with full support for IE7, Fx, Safari, and most importantly, Opera.
Why must Yahoo! support these browsers? The must support IE7 and Fx because they have first and second largest shares, respectively. They must supportchose Safari because that way Mac users wouldn’t be forced into downloading a 3rd party browser. They must support Opera because it is simply the greatest browser ever.
Hey Slasher, don’t use a desktop messenger anymore, there’s no need. You can use meebo, Y! web messenger, or better yet Y! Mail Beta.
One more thing… Buy Zoho and let Y!MB users view office documents w/out download using it.
Desktop messengers still have their advantages. For instance, the sharing pictures feature in AIM 6 is simply amazing, IMO. It’s really easy and fast to use.
Also, I don’t think you can send files with meebo, either, which is another big thing I like to do with desktop messenging apps.
Slasher- The only thing good about Yahoo Mail is that it has unlimited storage. Other than that, GMail kicks it’s ass.
I say why not just use Email for file transfer, especially when the two services are only one app. Have you tried the picture sharing in Y! Messenger? You just drag pics on, and they show up on the other person’s screen.
Yahoo could improve by stopping to use all these tracking mechanisms! I am not at all tempted to click links that look like [rds.yahoo.com]**http%3a//[microsoft.com] just to go to Microsoft.com by searching for it on Yahoo Search. Who knows what they might tell Yahoo about me…
Oh yah, those are annoying. The reason for me is I use Y!MB RSS in Fx, w/ Fx view in Opera ext. The problem is, if I open the links directly into Opera, I get an error, since they are Yahoo! formatted. I need to use the rewrite redirects bookmarklet to fix.
I think that Yahoo! excels in several different areas, specifically in photos (Flickr), bookmarks (Del.icio.us), and their news. These are several areas that I think Google and others need to work heavily on if they want to catch up to what Yahoo does. With that being said I think Yahoo needs to get an Office suite, and Zoho would be a great opportunity for them to jump into that arena.