Ged Carroll

Search results for: “yahoo!”

  • Friends from Yahoo!

    The highlight of this week was briefly catching up with a couple of friends from Yahoo!. The people that I met along the way at Yahoo! were great and I am proud to say that I have more than a couple of friends from Yahoo! The company got culture right, but board level business wrong.

    I didn’t get to watch The Oscars, but even I was aware that it was FUBAR’d. The Mobile World Congress saw the launch of new handsets by Sony, LG and Huawei – but were drowned about by Nokia reinventing their iconic 3310 feature phone. This showed that smartphone manufacturers had crafted their products to a high degree and no longer came up with products that amazed us. They are all now much-of-a-muchness.

    Rolex broke out an advertising campaign across TV and online to coincide with The Oscars. It shows the heritage that Rolex had in Hollywood. It surprised me that Rolex felt the need to do this

    More luxury related content here.

    The Worst Mission Statement Of All Time – Medium – epic

    Siberian tigers take out a drone that had been harassing them

    A Bathing Ape (BAPE) have done a tie-in with the new King Kong film. Given the Vietnam era setting I think that they could have done so much more such as ‘combat Zippo’ lighters, embroidered jackets and fatigues – instead there’s a t-shirt. You can tell that Nigo is no longer behind the wheel over there.

    A BATHING APE®︎ X KONG:SKULL ISLAND #bape #kongskullisland #KongIsKing #キングコング映画

    A post shared by A BATHING APE® OFFICIAL (@bape_japan) on

    A really nice film on data featuring Faris Yakob

  • Microsoft in Yahoo! saga

    Microsoft in Yahoo! saga

    Re/code has an interesting article on how the Microsoft in Yahoo! saga continues to influence the sell off of Yahoo! assets by investing money in whichever bid coalition wins. This feels like a riff on Yahoo!’s history over the past six years.

    Careful balancing act for Microsoft

    The 2010 aggressive bid for Yahoo! was one of the factors in the departure of Steve Ballmer as CEO. A Microsoft-owned Yahoo! made almost as little financial sense as the Nokia handset acquisition.

    A later deal via active investor Carl Icahn gave Microsoft everything it wanted. Access to Yahoo! search inventory with no upfront payments. Under the Microsoft deal Yahoo! lost search market share and ad money. Microsoft’s AdCenter was not able to monetise Yahoo!’s search traffic as well as Yahoo! did. Search used to be responsible for half of Yahoo!’s revenue.

    Whilst Yahoo! now represents a smaller proportion of search traffic it is still lucrative for Microsoft. Microsoft’s advances in cloud services are still not as lucrative as search advertising.

    Microsoft will want to defend a position that on a rational analysis shouldn’t last. By loaning money, it gains leverage over a new management team.

    Cheap money to structure deal would be attractive for private equity groups. But it will be bad for the management team put in place and Yahoo!’s future prospects. The Microsoft in Yahoo! saga was at best a spoiling move.

    All just a little bit of history repeating

    Microsoft provided financial support for Icahn’s run at Yahoo! which saw the departure of Jerry Yang – and the sale of his position in the company. At the time of his overthrow, Yang was the largest single shareholder in Yahoo!.

    Six years later we can all see how successful that was.

    Problems that it won’t solve

    Yahoo! morale. There will be a right-sizing of  the workforce, private equity will be ill-prepared to retain the talent required to maintain and evolve Yahoo!’s services. They will also find it impossible to bring in talent in key areas (beyond senior executives). Yahoo!’s former chief product offer Blake Irving is a case in point of this. Expect Facebook, Amazon, Google and others hoover up the key technical talent Yahoo! needs to retain.

    Yahoo!’s international business seems to be a point-of-failure. Yahoo! has withdrawn from markets, particularly in Asia where market conditions should be much better. It has wound up businesses that it had recently acquired in the Middle East. Yahoo! Europe seems to have gone from bad-to-worse.  Expect Yahoo! to shutter more businesses and consolidate its business in North America.

    A highly leveraged Yahoo! still won’t have a mobile advertising solution beyond Flurry. Yahoo!’s own mobile apps consistently under-perform in app marketplaces. The mobile talent Yahoo! has gained will head for the door.

    Yahoo! still won’t work out how to sell millennial advertising. Tumblr is a good property, yet Yahoo! can currently monetise 15 per cent of advertising inventory on the platform. How will private equity solve this? Or will someone else pick it up at a fire sale? Microsoft is likely to try and stop any sale to Google (which would be a natural home).

    Yahoo! still won’t have an effective play in social platforms. Flickr will still be a niche rather than mainstream product.

    A key goal for Microsoft would be to obtain search traffic from Yahoo! Japan. Since Yahoo! Japan is a joint venture with SoftBank, this won’t happen. Yahoo! Japan has already gone to court to keep Microsoft out of its business. The new relationship with a divested core won’t change this.

    Getting Yahoo! on Microsoft’s cloud would be a major coup, but would require major coding, something that private equity owners probably wouldn’t want to do.

    Yahoo!’s IP including core patents for paid search offer little opportunity for additional revenue. They can’t be used against Google and would be unattractive to sell on. Yahoo!’s contributions to open source software would be missed – PHP, Hadoop and the Debian distribution of Linux have all benefited.

    History as an indicator of failure

    This would represent the second activist shareholder owned board. The current one has been responsible for a catastrophic destruction of value. None of the acquirers have articulated a reason why advertisers should believe in them. Whilst a deal needs to maximise value for Yahoo! shareholders; if it doesn’t offer a plan that pleases customers – it will fail.

    A highly leveraged business will not be in a good place to cope with programmatic advertising which will likely reduce the cost of Yahoo!’s over-priced display ad inventory. The likely leverage also means that Yahoo! would make an unattractive long term partner for the major marketing groups. More on Yahoo! here.

    More information
    Microsoft Tells Possible Yahoo Buyers It Would Consider Backing Bids | Re/code
    Yahoo! – how did we get here? | renaissance chambara
    Reflecting on Yahoo!’s Q2 2015 progress report on product prioritisation | renaissance chambara
    Facebook: the Yahoo! patents case | renaissance chambara
    Why I am sunsetting Yahoo! | renaissance chambara
    The trouble with Yahoo!’s M&A scuttlebutt | renaissance chambara
    Thoughts on the Microsoft and Yahoo! search deal | renaissance chambara
    Yahoo! Japan and The Gordian Knot | renaissance chambara
    Yahoo!: some things I am worried about | renaissance chambara
    Barbarians in the valley | renaissance chambara
    The Steve Ballmer Post | renaissance chambara
    The Wall Street Journal Online bounced my comment | renaissance chambara
    A quick primer re @blakei @yahoo #delicious | renaissance chambara
    2010 MICROSOFT BID FOR YAHOO | NY TIMES

  • Yahoo! – how did we get here?

    Understanding who Yahoo! is today means understanding changes in the technology and media sectors. These changes occurred over the past 20 years.
    Jerry, Liam & David celebrate the new Yahoo! Mail

    The Fear

    Yahoo! started off as a hack. The directory grew from a list of sites catalogued by Jerry Yang and David Filo. They did this as students in Stanford. This was back in the early 1990s, Microsoft was the dominant technology company. It is hard to understand the power that Microsoft had at the time. Apple was on a fast track to oblivion. This power was later clipped in the Judge Jackson trial of 2000.

    The Media Company

    At the time, investors and founders were reluctant to go into business against Microsoft. Even the idea that Microsoft may enter a sector was enough for others to stay clear.

    The technology sector was full of casualties: Digital Research, Borland, Go and Stac Technologies. Microsoft’s approach to competition of embrace, extend and extinguish was already well known.

    Yang and Filo would have had this in mind when they positioned Yahoo! as a media company that happened to be online. Yahoo!’s early business deals such as Yahoo! Internet Life magazine and display advertising are symptomatic of this media thinking.

    The advertising display model that Yahoo! operated was reminiscent of print magazine and newspaper businesses. It even went ahead and hired a traditional media sector CEO in 2001. Terry Semel was a former chairman of Warner Brothers. He was brought in following a 30% collapse in online advertising sales. Semel’s efforts to build a media business at Yahoo! didn’t succeed.

    The Technology Company

    Yahoo! has a history of contributing to key open source technologies including:

    • Debian Project
    • PHP
    • Hadoop
    • Oozie

    The work done on Hadoop lead to a spinout technology company called Hortonworks. Hortonworks customers include eBay, Spotify and Expedia. Not bad for ‘media company’.

    Panama, was to drive quality and profit in advertising by increasing click through rates. Yet it took too long to develop, many other projects ended up being canceled.

    Despite of the technical expertise at Yahoo!. The company bought in many key technologies rather than building themselves. Yahoo! Mail came from acquiring the 411.com directory service which owned Rocketmail in 1997. The modern mail web application has its roots in Oddpost, acquired in 2004.

    Failure To Make Big Bets

    Yahoo! bought video and audio streaming company broadcast.com in 1999 for $5.7 billion. This was the most expensive thing Yahoo! every bought. By comparison Tumblr cost $1.1 billion dollars in 2013. Yahoo! ended up with little to show for it’s $5.7 billion. This meant that Yahoo! developed a culture which made it hard to make big bet the farm kind of changes.  Terry Semel rejected the opportunity to buy Google in 2002 for $5 billion. It also failed to buy DoubleClick. Google bought it instead, and used DoubleClick to speed up growth beyond search advertising.

    A secondary effect of not being able to make big bets was a constantly changing set of priorities. Insiders have gone on record talking about the missed changes with aborted projects. This also made it harder to develop and pursue a vision.

    The Google comparison

    Google started some five years later. Google came into a world where Microsoft looked weaker. The US government filed charges against the company and Linux started to gain momentum. Google’s original business model was to be a search engine provider for web portals. There were other competitors in this space like Inktomi. It wasn’t until 1999 that the company started selling its own advertising. Google waited six years to go public. The size and profitability of its business masked from competitors and customers until 2004.

    Google hasn’t been afraid to make big bets or have a big vision:

    • Search
    • Enterprise search
    • Personal productivity
    • Enterprise productivity
    • Mobile operating system

    It has thought carefully about focus and vision – which is part of the reason why the Alphabet conglomerate was formed.

    More information

    New Panama Ranking System For Yahoo Ads Launches Today | Search Engine Land
    A Cyber-Arsenal for Road Warriors | BusinessWeek
    Reflecting on Yahoo!’s Q2 2015 progress report on product prioritisation
    The Yahoo! Post-Bartz post and the perils of Microsoft Excel
    Inflection Point | renaissance chambara

  • Turnaround plan at Yahoo! + more

    Yahoo CEO Set to Refresh Turnaround Plan – WSJ – the turnaround plan sounds like desperate cost cutting. Yahoo! leadership have burned through a lot of runway and not made the best use of the company’s media assets. Mayer’s turnaround plan looked very much like Ross Levinsohn’s turnaround plan. The Levinsohn turnaround plan was in turn similar to pilot projects done when Terry Semel was CEO of Yahoo!

    Qatar to buy stake in HK department store operator | RTHK – interesting move getting them to buy a chunk of Sogo, probably because Macau is likely to pick up much of the growth in luxury sales

    LVMH: It May be Time for a Smartwatch – WSJ – not so sure that this is a good move, unless it is a fashion watch rather than a luxury item it could damage brands rather like the quartz lines did to luxury watches

    ISPs told to block fake luxury goods sales – FT.com – sounds like an inefficient game of whack-a-mole; they should go after the payments providers instead. That’s where the weak spot is

    App enables Chinese women to take selfies with sanitary pads – Mumbrella Asia  – uses the packs to activate an AR app allowing photos with the company mascot, but still WTF

    MediaTek, Acer working on smart surveillance solutions | WantChinaTimes – story about internet of things but the headline is telling…

    Sony’s plans to pull out of Chinese market an ‘open secret’ | WantChinaTimes – the big issue is that China is likely to be a good market for Sony’s high end consumer electronics products

    Uber fired a driver for tweeting mean stuff about them – douced

    Behold the awesome power of the spreadsheet, destroyer of worlds | Quartz – rather reminds me of the introduction to ‘Accidental Empires’ by Bob Cringely

    Old Technopanic in New iBottles | Cato @ Liberty – or why the government arguments for weak crypto are as much use as a chocolate teapot

  • Yahoo! back to 2005?

    Back to 2005

    Events at Yahoo! this week took me back to 2005 – the halcyon days web 2.0 days before popular social networks. If you are vaguely interested in the online sector, you will have noticed that Summly has been acquired by Yahoo!. The acquisition is interesting for a number of reasons:

    • It is a statement of Yahoo!’s mobile aspirations. Yahoo! has been in mobile for a good while, back to 2005 at least. Yahoo! Go tried to pull all the of the Yahoo! portal properties into an app-like experience and Yahoo! ZoneTag was an early experiment of attributing location to smartphone pictures well before the iPhone. Upload to Flickr was integrated into many SonyEricsson and Nokia phones (notably the bestselling Nokia N73) But none of these pioneering efforts were rewarded with market share
    • Yahoo! is looking to buy cool, like it did back in 2005 and 2006, acquiring web 2.0 businesses. Summly has had about one million downloads, mostly by early adopters of its news reader. It is not the mass-market audience that Yahoo! usually targets. Like Flickr and Delicious before it this is about cool. Whilst most of the focus has been on the media, Yahoo! has historically made these purchases to try and infuse some of the start-up get up and go DNA into the larger organisation
    • Summly makes some interesting technological choices that would appeal to Yahoo!. Firstly, surfacing content that consumers would find of interest; particularly interesting given that Google has abandoned RSS. Secondly, using analytical techniques to create abridged version of content could also be a differentiator in search in terms of both presentation and as a technique to improve relevance (if the abridged rather than full versions were indexed). However, Summly doesn’t own the technology itself, but is a mashup of underlying services
    • The 30 million dollar acquisition figure being bandied around mirrors the rumoured costs of buying both Flickr and Delicious back in 2005 and 2006. One of the key differences between Flickr and Delicious with Summly is the technology benefit that was brought to the table by the web 2.0 pioneers and in Flickr’s case the quality of the business on offer. Prior to being acquired Flickr was pretty close to breaking even with its freemium model
    • Summly is an interesting focus away from the traditional Silicon  and Bay Area stomping grounds of Yahoo!

    More information
    Yahoo! to acquire Summly | Yodel Anecdotal

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