This week, Yahoo! announced it was hiring -- or re-hiring -- co-founder Jerry Yang as CEO. The move comes as no surprise to me because I suggested it to a newly-minted Yahoo finance executive I was sitting next to on a Monday April 30th 2007 5 PM EST flight bound from New York City, where I was for the NFL Draft, to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he and I both live.
The conversation started because we were talking about the web and "Web 2.0". In the process of the talk, we both revealed our occupations. He was only with Yahoo for about three months to that point and had just come from a meeting regarding the then-new acquisition of Ad Bright, the online ad company, in New York. I said that one reason Google was way ahead of Yahoo! was that there were two recognizable founders at the center -- Larry Page and Sergi Brin. By contrast, Yahoo's founders were no where to be seen. I said the best way to recapture some attention and institutional memory was to bring back Jerry Yang.
After the conversation, the man said little. He was working on a massive Excel spreadsheet that explained Yahoo's ad inventory and revenue estimates. OK, I absorbed a lot of information. Hey, it was in my face, what could I do?
Yahoo's website is an enormous system containing over 100 million pages and several billion impressions. I was really surprised at just how large the site system and the company as a result, had become. And it may be the very reason for the problems it faces -- it's so big both in site and company structure that it's lost it's identity.
Can Jerry Yang bring Yahoo! back? Perhaps. But I think the first move should be to simplify what's there. Yahoo's all over the place and it's hard to see it in a coherent fashion. Google's website design provides a key, as it's many services are neatly separated and grouped so one does not get lost. This isn't true for Yahoo!'s site at all.
Yahoo! needs to find a new design formula that's easy and timeless and scaleable -- and stick with it.
