We are entering the endgame for Yahoo. The company will start to come apart and I think that is the right thing to happen. In a sense Yang’s leadership has been the best thing, if not for the company than for the broader tech industry. Yahoo always struck me as incoherent. Its Asian business is doing well independently of the US and would probably be much better off set free.
The US business has accumulated a lot of different sites which would perform better as tighter, more focused independent units. Delicious is one obvious example I have written about many times in the past. Flickr was another I initially dismissed as ‘money losing fluff’ but I now admit I was wrong. I saw the light when I started to use it and when the did the Getty deal. At the moment these and others are trapped inside Yahoo’s bureaucracy and being dragged down by it.
People talk about the benefits of size but all these really boil down to is common accounting, payroll and other back office functions. I have been reading a lot about organisation and the one I find most appealing is WL Gore. No unit in the company can exceed 250 people as that is the limit for an effective organisation. When the limit is reached a plant is split in two. It seems to me that this is the only way to run large organisations – as a federation of smaller ones all of which have maximum autonomy. Yahoo’s main problem at the moment is that its best companies are being crushed by its own size. It is the corporate equivalent of the Soviet Union and we all know how that ended.
Pic: Chen Yang
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So does that mean that Yahoo is about to invade Afghanistan then fall apart due to low oil prices like the USSR in the 1980s?
Not quite, but they are trying to do too much and control it all from the centre. Which is impossible.
wow, what a load of crap. i worked at gore for years and let me tell you, those best places to work rankings are crap. the lattice is a fallacy, this is definitely a chain of command there just like anywhere else. And no, no one can just call up the leaders there and talk to them. Yoy have to go up the ladder. There are plants with over 500 people in them. The 250 myth died decades ago. Overall, Gore puts on a great front and talks the talk, but they are no better, and actually much worse than other companies.
Thanks Nealah, it’s interesting to read how the reality measures up to what is written about Gore.