When Yahoo! released their numbers earlier this week, few would have been surprised, but the response by newly appointed CEO Jerry Yang, co-founder of the struggling online portal (or whatever you want to call it), is a bit strange:

“The next 100 days or so will be spent mapping out Yahoo’s strategic plan,” said Yang. “We’re well underway in our review of the business. We will move fast in a focused way.”

The company definitely needs to address the direction it is taking, or more importantly, define the direction it is taking. With an amazing collection of users, the data that should be available to them should make them an obvious choice for advertising dollars. Each customer, once logged in, should be completely profiled so advertisements are catered to their specific habits and needs. Unfortunately, Yahoo! has been unable to capitalize on that potential. Perhaps it is the lack of clarity in what they actual are - a portal, a search engine, a news and information  site - that hinders their progress, but I believe that the strength of the company lies in its breadth and depth. Moving forward, it must solidify its current operations and form a strategy to maximize revenues based on what it currently has in place.

Perhaps a good strategy would be integrated innovation. Maybe it’s time for Yahoo! to take a page from the Darkside? Or, if Yahoo! continues to stumble, we might start looking back at idea that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, something we mentioned when Google and Apple became more closely aligned, but could easily be applied to Yahoo! and Microsoft in the search engine/online advertising arena.

Digg this entry! This entry was posted on Friday, July 20th, 2007 at 10:01 am and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.