Unquestionably, the recruitment and hitching of Marissa Mayer's star to the aging, aching, ailing Yahoo brand and logo could only have been viewed as a positive move for a company that had completely lost touch with the times it lived in, and had thus left many with few reasons to believe. Anymore.
Yahoo somehow had let it all slip away; formerly glittering bejewelled crystals of sand poured out through the widening pores of a veritable pillar of salt of their very own making, converted into a cold, hard new composite that was interlaced with the reality that the dream was almost over. It piled up around the foundations, and walls, and once it began to seal off the windows and cut off the light, a previously precious "warmth" was gone. And there's a huge difference between feeling "cold" and looking "cool" in the high stakes business of high tech - or in this case, make that mobile tech.
Marissa has been on a shopping spree like almost no other for the past year and a half, and has thrown some twenty-plus start-ups into her shopping cart (presumably using a much more mobile-friendly and up-to-date provider for the online transactions!) since taking the reins at Yahoo. Kudos to her for realizing that the linchpins of the company's online image and business, Yahoo News, Yahoo.com and various online communication tools all needed a serious kick in their low-tech rears.
But it's historically been all about advertising, and less about end users of Yahoo. My men on the street tell me that today there is a whole new vibe on the 17th floor of their Manhattan offices, with a clear and purposeful switch to start-up atmosphere with teams of engineers running amok riding the new wave. Someone smart (I wonder who?!) made the conclusion that mobile media (make that mobile life!) was the way forward - yet there won't be any Nobel prizes for coming up with that pearl of wisdom. At other companies, it is neither the way forward nor the future. Why? Because that "future" is already here - it is now. Today.
But it's historically been all about advertising, and less about end users of Yahoo. My men on the street tell me that today there is a whole new vibe on the 17th floor of their Manhattan offices, with a clear and purposeful switch to start-up atmosphere with teams of engineers running amok riding the new wave. Someone smart (I wonder who?!) made the conclusion that mobile media (make that mobile life!) was the way forward - yet there won't be any Nobel prizes for coming up with that pearl of wisdom. At other companies, it is neither the way forward nor the future. Why? Because that "future" is already here - it is now. Today.
The fact that Yahoo are so far behind is a total indictment of how long and how deeply they have been asleep at the wheel. Somehow, as a shareholder, pictures like the one above, with Ms. Mayer arm-in-arm with a bunch of kids and tech geeks, does not exactly make anyone go all warm and fuzzy nor all "oh-ah" as they check the share prices which are far from romantic.
"I'm pleased with Yahoo!'s performance in the first quarter," Mayer said in April, 2013, after revenue had slipped, again. "I'm confident that the improvements we're making to our products will set up the company for long-term growth."
Now I am all for a head honcho defending their brand and standing strong in the face of deadly Bering Sea-like storms, but at some point one must acknowledge the issues, and rather than deny them, actually admit them publicly and take a stance on how one intends or is going to resolve them. A little over a year later from the quote above, a less sanguine Mayer yesterday addressed this past quarter's status.
"Our top priority is revenue growth and by that measure, we are not satisfied with our results. In Q2 we saw display revenue decline, further highlighting the fact that we need to work faster to ameliorate the negative trends. I believe we can and will do better moving forward."
It's hardly going to make anyone jump up and down and yell "Woohoo!", is it? This was in response to an extremely depressing revenue (after ad commissions) of barely one million dollars for the last quarter, which some analysts are calling "dismal". The storm continues unabated, and the board will only be willing to chip in and bale water out of the bilges for so long before the inevitable first mutinous whisper about a new captain rings out.
Now I am all for a head honcho defending their brand and standing strong in the face of deadly Bering Sea-like storms, but at some point one must acknowledge the issues, and rather than deny them, actually admit them publicly and take a stance on how one intends or is going to resolve them. A little over a year later from the quote above, a less sanguine Mayer yesterday addressed this past quarter's status.
"Our top priority is revenue growth and by that measure, we are not satisfied with our results. In Q2 we saw display revenue decline, further highlighting the fact that we need to work faster to ameliorate the negative trends. I believe we can and will do better moving forward."
It's hardly going to make anyone jump up and down and yell "Woohoo!", is it? This was in response to an extremely depressing revenue (after ad commissions) of barely one million dollars for the last quarter, which some analysts are calling "dismal". The storm continues unabated, and the board will only be willing to chip in and bale water out of the bilges for so long before the inevitable first mutinous whisper about a new captain rings out.
While I am glad that our Marissa has confidence, that is hardly a surprise for such an over-achiever, yet it is not enough to keep most of us warm at night. They can create a tech locker room nerdy boys club type of office all they want, and engineer the bejesus out of their creaky old rusty ship but there is one critical aspect that I think that Ms. Mayer should not let get buried in her clear desire to be "one of the lads" - or "one of the lasses" for that matter!
To what do I refer? Well, we will have to go back to web presence 101 for that one. It was called "web content" for a very good reason. I continue to be appalled at the lacklustre (often that's at best, sadly) and much too occasionally woeful excuse (at worst) for content that appears on many news items and blog posts directly associated with the Yahoo brand.
It's all very well recreating the great-free-snacks-and-pinball-machines-and-basketball-hoops playroom already hash(tagg)ed to death by the likes of Microsoft, Google and Facebook - but engineering can only do so much. You can build the most accurate and pristinely perfected car out of some magnificent engineering, all you want, but what if someone fills the tank with diesel and not fine grade unleaded? It's not going to be long before the inevitable stall.
It's all about end user and that user's experience, hands on, when it comes down to it. Mobile versions of the major Yahoo online offerings will only carry the car so far - unless the gas fueling it is of the highest quality possible. In this case, the analogy is that the content is the gas. You can go ahead and spend millions developing the new tools, but unless you attend to issues to do with the content accessed by those tools - you can forget it. Content is king, with a capital K, and there is still much work to be done.
Now it's not shocking that Ms. Mayer is heavily focused on engineering and product development - that's her core expertise. But as CEO, she needs to dive into the deeper end of uncharted waters, and address the content posted with the Yahoo brand tagged to it, especially the Canadian franchise. There are still way too many posts (blogs in particular) with titles and a blank space beneath, or a sloppily written excuse for content with typos, grammatical errors and words that mean nothing at all - collectively implying that the people she called back to head offices for "phoning-it-in" continue to do so - only they do it now from head office. Need an example? Here is an opening sentence on a blog from a big Canadian day, October 10, 2013, on the announcement of the first Canadian writer to win the Nobel prize for literature:
"Celebrated Canadian short-story writer Alice Munro, who announced her retirement earlier this year, has won the prestigious Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the first Canadian-based to earn the honour."
Did you spot it? It's quite typical but far from some of the worst examples. These people ripped Yahoo off, and I sincerely hope she knows it. There were one or two names in particular who regularly posted titles with zero content, and I have a funny feeling that these people billed Yahoo for producing "x"such pieces per month, and no one bothered to check the content. Or the blank space beneath the title. It was, is, and should always be a total professional embarrassment to all senior management at Yahoo, and that means Ms. Mayer too.
Yes, I know she bought tumblr, thereby accessing some real content (making a nice change), but it cost her over a billion dollars to do so. It's hard to call your company "The biggest start-up in the world" when you can afford to buy other real start-ups for over one billion dollars to boost your own brand! To date she has acquired over twenty of those real start-ups. It's quite ironic that she also needs China to maybe even survive, via her dependence on revenue from Alibaba, which is expected to go public shortly. If the Alibaba IPO is a bust, there's gonna be tears all over town.
In terms of content, calling Yahoo a "big start-up" is disingenuous. It's only like a start-up in terms of where it's not today, in relation to where it should be, already being a household name and part of the zeitgeist. Yahoo the "start-up" is a true oxymoron. One that Ms. Mayer is not going to get away with much longer. Yahoo is now officially a 20-year-old in 2014, and guess what - it's time to grow up - the teenager's adolescent years are over.
But you gotta give the gal a break - she's trying, at least. It probably is a little cooler to be a yahoo today. But the baby is all grown up, or should be. And we had a honeymoon, which is shortly going to be over too - today is in fact the second anniversary of Ms. Mayer's tenure as Yahoo CEO. Either Mayer and Yahoo deliver on the promise of transporting the brand into this decade (or beyond) or I fear that Ms. Mayer will be visiting that beyond in the form of the circumference outside Yahoo world, maybe even before all those young engineers hit their big 3-0.
"Transformation is not a singular event," she said. "It's a series of events and quarters, some more challenging than others and some more successful than others."
Ya think?! I think she can do it. She probably knows she can do it. But engineering is just the mechanics. You need the gas and you need the best drivers - and that can only come with a renewed and reinvigorated overhaul of that dirty word - content. When the day comes that she can look into the Yahoo mirror on the wall, and tell it that she is more than content with her content, then that's the day to go all "Woohoo!" over Yahoo!
It's all very well recreating the great-free-snacks-and-pinball-machines-and-basketball-hoops playroom already hash(tagg)ed to death by the likes of Microsoft, Google and Facebook - but engineering can only do so much. You can build the most accurate and pristinely perfected car out of some magnificent engineering, all you want, but what if someone fills the tank with diesel and not fine grade unleaded? It's not going to be long before the inevitable stall.
It's all about end user and that user's experience, hands on, when it comes down to it. Mobile versions of the major Yahoo online offerings will only carry the car so far - unless the gas fueling it is of the highest quality possible. In this case, the analogy is that the content is the gas. You can go ahead and spend millions developing the new tools, but unless you attend to issues to do with the content accessed by those tools - you can forget it. Content is king, with a capital K, and there is still much work to be done.
Now it's not shocking that Ms. Mayer is heavily focused on engineering and product development - that's her core expertise. But as CEO, she needs to dive into the deeper end of uncharted waters, and address the content posted with the Yahoo brand tagged to it, especially the Canadian franchise. There are still way too many posts (blogs in particular) with titles and a blank space beneath, or a sloppily written excuse for content with typos, grammatical errors and words that mean nothing at all - collectively implying that the people she called back to head offices for "phoning-it-in" continue to do so - only they do it now from head office. Need an example? Here is an opening sentence on a blog from a big Canadian day, October 10, 2013, on the announcement of the first Canadian writer to win the Nobel prize for literature:
"Celebrated Canadian short-story writer Alice Munro, who announced her retirement earlier this year, has won the prestigious Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the first Canadian-based to earn the honour."
Did you spot it? It's quite typical but far from some of the worst examples. These people ripped Yahoo off, and I sincerely hope she knows it. There were one or two names in particular who regularly posted titles with zero content, and I have a funny feeling that these people billed Yahoo for producing "x"such pieces per month, and no one bothered to check the content. Or the blank space beneath the title. It was, is, and should always be a total professional embarrassment to all senior management at Yahoo, and that means Ms. Mayer too.
Yes, I know she bought tumblr, thereby accessing some real content (making a nice change), but it cost her over a billion dollars to do so. It's hard to call your company "The biggest start-up in the world" when you can afford to buy other real start-ups for over one billion dollars to boost your own brand! To date she has acquired over twenty of those real start-ups. It's quite ironic that she also needs China to maybe even survive, via her dependence on revenue from Alibaba, which is expected to go public shortly. If the Alibaba IPO is a bust, there's gonna be tears all over town.
In terms of content, calling Yahoo a "big start-up" is disingenuous. It's only like a start-up in terms of where it's not today, in relation to where it should be, already being a household name and part of the zeitgeist. Yahoo the "start-up" is a true oxymoron. One that Ms. Mayer is not going to get away with much longer. Yahoo is now officially a 20-year-old in 2014, and guess what - it's time to grow up - the teenager's adolescent years are over.
But you gotta give the gal a break - she's trying, at least. It probably is a little cooler to be a yahoo today. But the baby is all grown up, or should be. And we had a honeymoon, which is shortly going to be over too - today is in fact the second anniversary of Ms. Mayer's tenure as Yahoo CEO. Either Mayer and Yahoo deliver on the promise of transporting the brand into this decade (or beyond) or I fear that Ms. Mayer will be visiting that beyond in the form of the circumference outside Yahoo world, maybe even before all those young engineers hit their big 3-0.
"Transformation is not a singular event," she said. "It's a series of events and quarters, some more challenging than others and some more successful than others."
Ya think?! I think she can do it. She probably knows she can do it. But engineering is just the mechanics. You need the gas and you need the best drivers - and that can only come with a renewed and reinvigorated overhaul of that dirty word - content. When the day comes that she can look into the Yahoo mirror on the wall, and tell it that she is more than content with her content, then that's the day to go all "Woohoo!" over Yahoo!
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