What moron would expire news article URLs when disk space is plentiful and cheap? Apparently Yahoo doesn’t want me to use del.icio.us. The sad thing, just as with their RSS mess, is that they have people working for them who know better. That place needs it’s own mini. Too many clueless middle managers.
2006-09-29: The red tape saga at Yahoo continues.

“NOW let’s just pause for a second.” It is the 4th pause for thought that Terry Semel, chairman and chief executive of Yahoo!, has requested in 10 minutes. He is trying to marshal various arguments to prove that his firm, the world’s largest internet company by visitors to its website, has a coherent and winning strategy compared with Google, a phenomenally successful search engine. With only slightly bigger revenues, Google has 3.5x the market value of Yahoo!. 2x in 3 months Wall Street has dumped the shares of Yahoo! and widened the gap.

2006-10-09: Good article on the many problems at Yahoo.

But the problems at Yahoo go beyond advertising. From video programming to social networking — areas of interest to users and advertisers alike — the company is losing its initiative. And each time a product fails in the market or is late, Yahoo loses some ability to do more deals and hire more talented employees. The shares are down 38% this year, sending some employees out the door in search of better shots at stock market wealth.

2006-10-14: Who indeed

I think the better buyer is a media company. News Corporation is the one that most comes to mind. Rupert has shown that he’s serious about the Internet and that he is not afraid to make big bets. It would be highly dilutive since News Corp itself has a $65B market cap, but it might be accretive to earnings given that News Corp trades at a higher EBITDA multiple than Yahoo! now. The one reason I think its most unlikely is that News Corp has shown an interest in working closely with Google and buying Yahoo! would take them in an opposite direction.

2006-11-23: Heh. Snark at the incompetence manifest in the manifest.

The latest example from Yahoo!, the world’s largest internet company by some measures, reverses the trend. Brad Garlinghouse, a manager just senior enough to be noteworthy, has put forth a “Peanut Butter Manifesto”, which was helpfully “leaked” to the Wall Street Journal. It was meant as part St Crispin’s Day speech to rally the troops, part corporate analysis of Yahoo!’s many troubles, part turnaround plan—and, it seems, part publicity stunt. But it turned out to be a redundant series of platitudes, split infinitives, clichés and mixed metaphors.

2006-12-03: Problems not just with monetization, but basic search, still:

Y! may have 28% of all Internet searches, but for some reason Y! does not generate 28% of Internet traffic.

2006-12-07: Cultural conflict

The story about Braun taking a big corner conference room at Y! HQ and turning it into an office (when even Jerry Yang has a cube out amongst the ‘rank and file’) is a totally rich illustration of SoCal vs NoCal, uh, charm.

2006-12-11: “leaked” like peanut butter?

Facebook flatly rejected the $1B offer, looking for far more. Yahoo was prepared to pay up to $1.62B, but negotiations broke off before the offer could be made.

2007-01-18: Time for Plan B at Yahoo. Funnily self-referential
2007-02-25: +1

At Yahoo, the marketers rule, and at Google the engineers rule. And for that, Yahoo is finally paying the price.

2007-04-19: Nice 1 page summary of an endless list of problems.
2007-06-11: 80 VPs? That’s crazy, and 70 too many.

Yahoo disputes the notion that it is losing people at an unusual rate, saying that it had named 80 vice presidents worldwide this year

2007-07-25: Now there’s a surprise. I am puzzled why good people like Micah Dubinko can stand the nonsense over there.

My time at Yahoo! wasn’t super productive – I had a lot of ideas, but zero ability to get them implemented

2007-09-12: Oy. Talk about a preference for pain.

I’m not going to lie to you, it’s rough going right now. We get smacked around by the media. It’s been a while since we had a really big, notable win. I think morale at the company is low, the future uncertain and the food still sucks (although, I’ve had worse). But despite that, we had a record turnout for our last internal hack day. We had so many people with ideas that we had to completely change the format of the event because the campus could no longer scale to meet our demands. There is still plenty fight in this company and we have no shortage of asses to kick. So lace up all you Yahoo!’s…the ass won’t kick itself.

2007-10-03: 50? Try 500. No wonder they can’t get anything done.

People at Yahoo figure out the average number of employees per VP. The number seems to be around 50.

2007-10-06: Could be worth as much $45 per share with a dramatic overhaul that would include outsourcing its paid search, cutting staff by 25% and restructuring its graphic display advertising.
2007-11-30: I especially liked the one about the 300 VPs.

2007-12-11: Traffic down

web search queries on Yahoo! were down 10% from November 2006

2008-02-01: Comarketing

Think about it… Yahoo doesn’t mean keyboards. They didn’t do plastics or ergonomic research or think of some insight about key travel distance. The message was that Yahoo was willing to put their name on anything.

2008-02-15: I think its related to education levels. Dumb people can’t tell if they are getting crap results.

Yahoo is strong in “struggling societies,” “blue collar backbone,” and “remote America,” where as Google obtains higher use in “small town contentment,” “affluent suburbia,” and “upscale America.”

2008-04-21: Simple features take 2 years to launch indeed.
2008-07-01: Can I haz flickr / del.icio.us?

Microsoft is trying to put together a sort of take-over coalition where Microsoft would get Yahoo’s search while AOL or News Corp would acquire other parts of Yahoo. However, it doesn’t seem all that likely.