Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has had two months to settle into her purple-and-gold throne in Sunnyvale. She's sent some rah-rah notes to buck up the spirits of the Yahoos. And she's made some quick moves to restructure her leadership team.
Now, all she needs is a strategy to save Yahoo.
Fortunately, I have just what she needs: some friendly, unsolicited advice from your local business columnist.
Despite all you've read about Yahoo this past year, the company has some tremendous strengths and opportunities.
I was already a fan of the strategy that much-maligned founder and former Chief Executive Jerry Yang was pursuing. He wanted to turn Yahoo into an open, more social platform that would allow anyone to write applications to add new functions and services. This is a long-term strategy, but one that reflects the way the Web is evolving. Bartz should build on it.
Here are three steps for doing that:
1. Recognize what Yahoo is and is not. I have never really considered Yahoo to be a search company. But somehow, it let itself be defined as one, and so looked increasingly sluggish compared to Google.
2. Sell Yahoo search to Microsoft. CEO Steve Ballmer again threw the door wide open last week. During an interview with a BusinessWeek editor, he said he'd chatted with Bartz by phone about search and "sees a real opportunity for a deal."
3. Buy Twitter and FriendFeed. At first glance, such a suggestion might just cause users of both services to go, well, berserk. But hear me out.
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