Management Advice For Yahoo

Many have made it a big deal how Yahoo has become so deep in trouble with regards to legal issues and other management concerns. Here are some advice from analysts and opinionated individuals as reported by Businessweek.com

1. Bernstein Research analyst Jeffrey Lindsay advised in a Jan. 11 report that Yahoo fire 2,000 employees. He said that would give Yahoo more profits to pursue initiatives such as mobile search and video as well as acquisitions. The company is mulling layoffs, but more in the range of hundreds of employees. Deeper cuts, flagged privately by people at Yahoo as unlikely, sound more like wishful thinking by investors than sound advice. They presume that Yahoo is stumbling toward death's door when it's not: In its fourth-quarter report Jan. 29, the company is expected to show a 15% gain in sales, to $1.4 billion, though profits are expected to fall.
   

   Yahoo's major acquisitions over the past year, such as Right Media, BlueLithium, and Zimbra, surely created redundant positions. If they haven't been eliminated already, it's time.
   
   

2. Lindsay and others also think Yahoo should give up on its search efforts and just pay Google to drive its search engine. It's easy to understand why. Yahoo keeps losing search market share to Google, whose engine handles from 56% to 66% of all queries, depending on who's counting. By contrast, Yahoo's share is usually from 18% to 21%. "The text-ad war has been lost," says Scott Rafer, CEO of ad network Lookery and former CEO of MyBlogLog, which Yahoo bought a year ago.

   But others think Yahoo would be crazy to cede such an important front, not to mention control of the Web's most lucrative advertising opportunity. "It's a pretty critical component of getting people to start with Yahoo and stay there," says Ned May, director and lead analyst at market researcher Outsell. Just as important, data from searches, still the most important indication of a user's intention to buy, ultimately may prove crucial for targeting display ads to individuals as well.

   Notably, marketers and ad firms are rooting for Yahoo because they want a stronger No. 2 just to keep Google honest. "I would hate to see Google become almost a monopoly," says Lee. If Yahoo can keep making even mild progress in search advertising—its revenue per search rose 20% in the third quarter—keeping it in-house seems worthwhile.

3. If there's one rumor that keeps coming back again and again, it's this one. And with every replay, the speculation seems ever more driven by investors looking for a quick exit than by any actual deliberations by Yahoo or Microsoft. The software giant, which only last year spent the most it has ever put into an acquisition with the $6 billion purchase of aQuantive, seems unlikely to put up the upwards of $27 billion it would take to buy Yahoo. Such a deal would also carry big risks, as the merged company would likely lose even more ground to Google in the time it would take to integrate Yahoo's and Microsoft's operations and businesses.



4. In an impassioned call on the blog GigaOm on Jan. 22, Mitra advised Yahoo to forget about downsizing and "please put up a fight." She said Yahoo has an unmatched opportunity on the emerging new Web, which she views as being dominated by highly specialized services. So, she advises, Yahoo should consider buying jobs site Monster.com (MNST) to complement Yahoo HotJobs, photo service Shutterfly to go with Yahoo's Flickr site, travel sites such as Expedia (EXPE) or Priceline (PCLN) and more, to fill out the portal's strengths in these specialized markets.

   Problem is, Yahoo doesn't seem to have the resources to get this aggressive. Its cash position of $2.2 billion trails laughably behind Google's $13 billion stash and Microsoft's $19 billion trove. And the stock market clearly isn't valuing Yahoo's shares enough to make them a powerful currency for deals. As much as Yang may want to follow this path, it's unlikely he can.