This is a question Mike Arrington posed on TechCrunch about a month ago:
This is a question that she must be ready to answer, to the press, to shareholders, to the world and, most importantly, to her employees. Right now Yahoo doesn’t know what they are or where they’re going. And until they do, they can’t become whatever it is that they want to be.
The fact is, Yahoo doesn’t care what it is. All it knows is it’s one of the biggest web properties and that’s not going to change anytime soon. This gives them the luxury of NOT needing a product strategy (more on this later).
In Yahoo’s mind, they don’t need more users. What they need is more monetization. That’s why they are focused on beefing up sales and marketing to agencies and advertisers. How do they repackage and rebundle their same old media products to create excitement and buzz about advertising on Yahoo? See their recent attempts here and here.
In many ways, Yahoo is right to think this way. The returns on investing in sales and marketing are much greater than on investing in product (because everyone already goes to Yahoo regularly). At this stage in their corporate life, Yahoo is the anti-startup. Where startups strictly worry about growth and put off monetization, Yahoo strictly worries about monetization and doesn’t care about growth.
Whether a company is wise to operate without a product strategy is a debate for another day.
