Yahoo's new CEO can't go back to what Yahoo was; that's how it got to what it is! Instead she has to look at something that Yahoo has always rejected, which is a relationship with the telcos and cablecos. They'd love a partner in creating service applications.
Thanks, Joanne, and you're right about "cool". The temptation for everyone, I think, will be to assume that somehow the same goal can be linked to the same behaviors. Hula hoops were cool in the '50s but wiggling around in one isn't going to provoke the same emotion today.
You're also right about the board being a kind of universal whipping boy, but in some ways that's fair because they represent governance and the shareholders while the executives represent employees and operations. If you want to change how a company behaves you need board backing. I think you need employee buy-in too, of course. I've worked with a lot of companies where the top person wanted change and just couldn't push it through all the bodies that got in the way. Often the board is part of the logjam, but just as often it's the senior management.
Tom, you wrote: Even if Marissa has full backing, and even if she is prepared to think outside the box, she may be boxed in by her own people.
I agree. Marissa needs to bring the cool factor to Yahoo with new ideas and strategies. Yes, she can revisit old strategies, too. But will the board listen? That's the bigger question. We discuss over and over againon IE with different companies that it's the board, yet not much changes. Not getting the job done is the symptom, not the cause.
Good point, Paul. I think that a failure to back her at this point would be fatal to the board's credibility. Even if they do back her, though, a company starts with the CEO but there's layers of management and culture underneath, and it can be very difficult and time-consuming to change it all. Even if Marissa has full backing, and even if she is prepared to think outside the box, she may be boxed in by her own people.
There is a classic Eistein's quotation that states ' we can't solve our problems with the same kind of thinking that created them'. I think that should be a guiding working principle for the new Yahoo CEO and Board. Yahoo has to forge a new radicaldirection if it is to survive and I hope the new CEO will learn from the failures of the last three CEOs. But the question that will be on everybody's mind is whether the board is willing to back her. We will just have to wait and see.
Daniel Loeb certainly thinks he has a different mindset to the old board. He must think Marissa is worth this package, as his investors (in his mind) are paying for it. We'll see.
I wonder if different people equals different mindset, though. I guess we'll see with Marissa; a black-box process is defined by the relationship between its inputs and outputs!
The Yahoo board which selected Marissa is quite different from the board which selected Bartz and Thompson, so perhaps we shouldn't be too quick to attribute intellectual inertia to them.
As for the all the challenges we hear that Marissa is facing -- Yahoo's decline, her first baby -- I am not going to lose too much sleep for her having seen today's estimates of her remuneration package.
All true, Mary. Most of the financial flaps we've had have included recommendtations for more independent boards, more board insight, etc. The board, and also the key second-tier executives in a company, have a kind of attitude inertia that predisposes them toward certain actions regardless of whether they're smart or not. Ego is definitely a big part of that, and so is simple fear. Nobody wants to face a new paradigm when they've spent their whole career learning an older one!
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
Subsidized handsets, rather than locked handsets, should be the focus of regulators. We're not getting good deals, not fostering innovation, and weakening our power as buyers.
50 billion household devices will be on the Internet by 2020, according to Cisco. And we're hearing foreign governments are hacking our infrastructure. Surely our refrigerators are next!
YouTube's move to a partial pay-for-view model could help relieve a dearth of good new content but it could also complicate debates in many parts of the world over payment by content providers for delivery of their material to customers.
That's what Larry Page said on Google's earnings call, referring to the conjunction of mobile and the cloud. Well, let's chart it then! We need to be thinking about an Internet where 90% of our traffic goes to 70 destinations within 40 miles of us.
Facebook's Graph Search may face some profound challenges and risks, first, because Facebook users haven't been thinking of their posts as product reviews; and second, because Facebook will now have to contend with the social-network equivalent of SEO "gaming" of results.
EU operators are considering joining up to create a pan-European network to reduce competitive overbuild and cost. This might lower costs and focus operators on higher-level, more interesting services.
MySpace is reinventing itself by focusing on content, but it's too late, and other social networks should learn from its example by looking toward a telco payment model if they want to sustain user commitment and their own revenue.
Comcast and other broadband providers just might exempt content they own from counting against consumer Internet usage caps. Would that make their broadband services more desirable?
When Reiter gets incensed over incompetent Verizon FiOS order-taking and support, he broadcasts it via Twitter. Did it do any good? How should your company offer Twitter support? Watch this for all the answers.
Evidence shows that you can tweet too much. Sites and services like Twitter and Facebook are a good place to reach your audience, but think quality over quantity.
What can users today do to protect their online privacy? The simplest and most obvious option is to not use the Internet – at all. However, once all digital information is consolidated over the Internet, trying to protect digital identity by simply unplugging from the Internet becomes impossible – a fact that has manifest implications for civil liberties, Saunders says.
By 2011 the number of Internet-connected sensors will exceed 1 trillion, making your chances of doing anything or going anywhere unnoticed pretty much zero. Saunders talks about how the 'sensortization' of the Internet is eliminating the traditional divide between online and offline populations.
The 20th Century Internet was characterized by the ability to interact with other people and information on the Internet largely without anyone knowing who you were. The Internet of this century, conversely, will be defined by identity. Saunders explains how Internet users are unwittingly contributing to the demise of the anonymous Internet.
How do you recognize an Internet bubble when you see one? Saunders explains how all bubbles have four symptoms in common – and takes a swipe at Google and Twitter into the bargain.
Some recent research shows that 8% of Internet users generate 85% of ad click-throughs. There are three possible reasons for this, and they go from bad to worse. Together, they show that we need to know more about Internet advertising.
Ushering in a new era of cognitive computing systems, IBM announced today the IBM Watson Engagement Advisor, a technology breakthrough that allows brands to crunch big data in record time to transform the way they engage clients in key functions such as customer service, marketing, and sales.
Expert Integrated Systems: Changing the Experience & Economics of IT In this e-book, we take an in-depth look at these expert integrated systems -- what they are, how they work, and how they have the potential to help CIOs achieve dramatic savings while restoring IT's role as business innovator. READ THIS eBOOK
your weekly update of news, analysis, and
opinion from Internet Evolution - FREE! REGISTER HERE
Wanted! Site Moderators Internet Evolution is looking for a handful of readers to help moderate the message boards on our site – as well as engaging in high-IQ conversation with the industry mavens on our thinkerNet blogosphere. The job comes with various perks, bags of kudos, and GIANT bragging rights. Interested?
To save this item to your list of favorite Internet Evolution content so you can find it later in your Profile page, click the "Save It" button next to the item.
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
Email This
