Marissa Mayer at Yahoo has come out with her strategy on turning the company around: culture, company, calibration, and compensation. But Yahoo needs to have a technical approach to the mobile cloud opportunity, not a management theory lesson.
All companies generate a culture through their historical practices and their hiring, and eventually they end up with a stamp on their thinking. That may be the case with Yahoo. Still, my own experience tells me that companies that are willing to be aggressively different can almost always do something to change their fortunes. I think Mayer's big test is whether she can force the board to give her the room to succeed. Otherwise, she's the latest victim.
Marissa Mayer has a solid tech background, doesn't she? She joined Google as an engineer. Is she too remote from the tech cutting edge to provide leadership now?
Yes, Yahoo could be hiding something great. But I really don't think so. And it may not be the fault of the CEO. The board and other powers that be at Yahoo could be holding the company back or insisting on the wrong direction. It's taken more than one person to make Yahoo a coporate Greek tragedy; it's going to take significant corporate change to take it in another direction. I'm still skeptical.
There are so many cases in tech these days when I feel the company has a clear path forward to at least a good shot at success, and doesn't take it. In this case the only saving grace (sort of) is that I'm not sure whether they're taking such a path or not. They could be planning something smart, but I don't see the value in hiding that if there IS such a plan!
Spot on, Tom. Absent some dramatic innovation in Yahoo's actual product lines and services, I don't have much faith that this latest CEO can get the job done, either.
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.
Twitter's changes are clearly aimed at being more Facebook-like, and this is because both companies are vying to serve the mobile social network market. But can that market work for anybody, given how difficult it is to push ads to social-update readers?
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.
Elizabeth Pizzinato, SVP of marketing and communications at Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, calls content marketing "the new black" and explains how her brand engages its target audience.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
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.
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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
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