Industry Note: Why Yahoo is the New AOL, Or The Anatomy of Strategy Decay
If you haven't read the
Peanut Butter Memo/Manifesto, you should.
It's not just a deeply felt, shot through the heart cry of corporate Bon Jovi style pain. It's a mini case study in how not to...everything in the post-network economy - a mini case study of what strategy decay in the post-network economy looks, smells, feels, and tastes like.
I've argued for a long time that Yahoo is the new AOL. The strategic and organizational parallels to AOL circa 2001 are eerie.
Siloed organization, creating enormous inertia? Check.
Lack of vision, insight, and direction at the top? Check.
Too many bright people in the middle, tussling over a shrinking pie? Check.
A fundamental misunderstanding of what the business, economics, and dynamics really are? Check.
A deep-seated fear of ruffling the feathers of the Golden Goose (ie, home page)? Check.
I could go on, but it would be belabouring the point.
Which is that there's a deeper truth in this parable of the convergence in strategy decay of two very different companies (remember, Yahoo was born in typical freewheeling Valley fashion, whereas AOL was beancounterville from the beginning).
That's that the next set of consumer industries demand a fundamentally different
kind of firm - one whose DNA has been renewed and reshaped by markets, networks, and communities.
Though Yahoo pays lip service to them, they are nowhere to be found in it's DNA (contrast for a sec with Google).
And, ultimately, this - the stale, tired industrial DNA of the last century, utterly out of sync with the radically new kind of firm the post-network economy demands - is the cause of all the problems (not the stuff in the Peanut Butter Manifesto, though there are tantalizing glimmers of this in there).
And - yeah, I told them all this a very long time ago; they don't listen to punks like me :)
