Post Semel
Old news travels fast on the web and while I could offer yet another perspective on the departure of CEO, Terry Semel, I will leave that to others. Instead, I want to focus on a potential opportunity the company might consider which would draw on its early strengths with innovative video delivery.
If you recall the Vision Platform™ in its first incarnation as Finance Vision and later as an attempt to deliver sports and news on a subscription basis you will remember a flexible and robust platform that was user friendly and held promise for the company to distinguish itself back in the days when Google was but just a search engine.
The reasons for the lack of traction with Finance Vision was a mix of technology and company politics. The failure of the subscription based platform may have been attributed to cost to consumers and timing.
More recently, there was an aborted attempt at original content creation.
Yahoo’s does not have problems with creating innovative technology, its problems are a lack of innovative vision on the part of its management team, it is good that Jerry Yang is stepping up to the CEO role and perhaps time has afforded him an opportunity to decide where he wants to lead the company.
Below are some articles I wrote over the past year.
Do You Remember Finance Vision
Yahoo! scaling back original video production
Contest
I have a nice new Black Yahoo! T-Shirt I'll send to the person who has the most interesting and thoughtful comment to this post.
Comments
Well Bob, that'd be the... Anywho, interesting item. I find it ironic that the failed leadership over Yahoo coincided with an industry that was also suffering record losses as of late - Hollywood - Mr. Semel's former employer. And typically, Mr. Semel is not asked to leave, he just takes a back seat while Mr. Yang starts to pull the strings again. I have an idea. Why doesn't Yahoo hire... an innovator?!! Ya think? Can we say, "change the business model, Bob?" Obviously what's best for Yahoo is to go back to the drawing board and think about how they are going to compete with what is now officially the #1 recognized brand... Google. Do you Google, uh Yahoo? BTW: my shirt size is large :)
Posted by: David | July 5, 2007 5:42 PM