Comments on: How any large company can blow it.

By: Shripriya

Shripriya — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 15:29:19 +0000

@ DrDoubt – clearly, Yahoo has a lot of stuff going for it. However, my post was as much about how *any* large company can let the sheer size (and issues that come with that size) let an opportunity pass it by and I used Yahoo as an example to prove that point.

The thing they messed up was the launch of Panama, not passing on Google. I am sure we can all agree that it would have been in their best interest to have had it a long time ago.

By: drdoubt

drdoubt — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 10:15:57 +0000

Yahoo is a terrific company. Its easy to write articles and blog posts saying they blew it – after the sky becomes clear after the web2.0 metoo clouds move away, yahoo’s efforts will become visible and clear.

Yahoo has done only one mistake so far : not buying out disney in 99 when they had the market cap to do so. not buying google was not a mistake: that could never have happened.

By: Shripriya

Shripriya — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 19:35:20 +0000

Oh, come on, Forth Ump, give us some good info. No one will know – this blog only has imaginary readers!

By: Fourth Umpire

Fourth Umpire — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 05:25:41 +0000

All I’ll say is that I lived the birth and gestation of Panama, and I left Yahoo in 2005.

By: The Jongleur

The Jongleur — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 01:34:38 +0000

The problem with yahoo is not that it did too little – it did too much and ended up caving under the weight of its own portfolio. It just – wanted to be everyone at the same time – content provider, search king, portal monarch, job shop, tax advisor, ISP (??, pop vending machine ad infinitum. Probably sticking to what it did best (being the starting block for users on the web) could have been the best tonic for all these problems. Google took the opposite route – worked really hard at being the best in one arena (search) that drove users to look into alternative (though eminently forgettable) offerings from Google. You are right – Yahoo had no singular definitive killer app that uprooted the world off its axis – it just tried being the Jack of a million trades.