Yahoo (with US News and World Report) has a rundown of 10 cars that helped sink Detroit. It's a good reminder of just how arrogant car executives have been.
I have been wondering lately if the Federal bailout of Chrysler back in 1979 was a good idea. The Heritage Foundation didn't think so in 1983. This is one of the few times I find myself intrigued by an argument coming from Heritage; normally I don't even bother listening to them. I'm not in a position to verify the arguments laid out in this article, but it sure is interesting.
One thing I learned from the Heritage article was that Chrysler was actually the second largest car company in the country, ahead of Ford, until after WWII. Then they started making management mistakes.
OK, hold on. Chrysler management has been making bad decisions for fifty years? Now I am really not sure if saving it was a good idea.
I know some good people who work for Chrysler. Of course, with family in Detroit, I pretty much have to know people at all of the Big Three. My cousin does PR for Chrysler. I have lots of nostalgic reasons to like Chrysler.
But I'm not sure I have any rational reasons to support Chrysler anymore. If Fiat doesn't buy it, I think it's time to bid adieu. Maybe Ford will buy Jeep. Other than that, tho, I don't see much reason for optimism.
Showing posts with label Yahoo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Yahoo. Show all posts
Friday, April 3, 2009
Monday, December 1, 2008
Carl Icahn buys more Yahoo! stock
Carl Icahn, the corporate raider who just won't slow down, has bought more shares in Yahoo! Wired asks the obvious question:
My guess - and it's strictly a guess - is that he's betting on the medium term. I don't think he's planning on taking over the company himself. My guess is that he's hoping someone - presumably other than Microsoft - will buy it.
I find Yahoo! fascinating, in an odd sort of way. I use Yahoo! Mail, which works well, and I occasionally click on stories on the front page. But I also think of it as a great missed opportunity.
Is Yahoo! a media company, or a tech company? I'm not sure management knows. It started out as a tech company, and it still functions that way in some respects - the aforementioned email, for example. It is still operates a search engine. I have bought almost all of my domain names through Yahoo!, because it's easy. But I blog through Google, because I never could figure out how to do it through Yahoo! And, of course, GeoCities is a shell of what it used to be. And what it could have been.
On the media side, Yahoo is obviously a new media company, but it's sort of an old media company's version of a new media company. I'm generalizing here, but it seems like a vast majority of its content is simply aggregated from somewhere else. God knows it's comprehensive - pick a mainstream news topic, and you can probably find it on Yahoo! College basketball? Sure. Latest from the Mideast? In here somewhere. But it doesn't generate much new content, if any. There is no original investigative reporting done for Yahoo! Which is fine, because it's a media company, but not a journalistic enterprise.
It seems to do many of these things well. But I don't really care. I tend to find my information at sites that are either specialized, or that I know will have detailed information in a place that is easy to find. For example, on Saturday night, I wanted to find out the score of the USC-Notre Dame game, so I went to latimes.com, because I know that, for the LA Times, covering the Trojans is a high priority. I'm sure Yahoo had that as well, but it will be part of the overall college football coverage.
The economic rationale for a search engine is simple: it gives you the ability to do something that you could not otherwise do. Without search engines, the Web would be a vast wilderness, nowhere nearly as rich as it is now. The price you pay is an ad on the page of search results. A very small price for a great benefit. For the consumer, that's a sweet deal. It also makes sense for the company, because delivering the product costs very little, and it's highly scalable. The bandwidth and computing costs for each search are almost negligible.
But the economic rationale for a media aggregator like what Yahoo! has become are very different. The costs are much higher, and it's harder to differentiate your product from your competitors (who may also be your partners).
Yahoo! has many things going for it. It's at the center of a vast network; it has relationships all over the world. I don't think it's necessary for it to choose to be either a media company or a tech company; I think might be able to pull off both. But it has to be excellent at both. Right now, it's a decent tech company, and it's a decent media company. But Google is a great tech company, and the New York Times is a great media company. There are many other great tech companies, and many other great media companies. Right now, Yahoo! is neither.
So, was Icahn speculating on price alone -- based on Friday's closing price of $11.51 Icahn has an unrealized capital gain of about $10 million -- or is he investing in the longer-term prospects for Yahoo?
My guess - and it's strictly a guess - is that he's betting on the medium term. I don't think he's planning on taking over the company himself. My guess is that he's hoping someone - presumably other than Microsoft - will buy it.
I find Yahoo! fascinating, in an odd sort of way. I use Yahoo! Mail, which works well, and I occasionally click on stories on the front page. But I also think of it as a great missed opportunity.
Is Yahoo! a media company, or a tech company? I'm not sure management knows. It started out as a tech company, and it still functions that way in some respects - the aforementioned email, for example. It is still operates a search engine. I have bought almost all of my domain names through Yahoo!, because it's easy. But I blog through Google, because I never could figure out how to do it through Yahoo! And, of course, GeoCities is a shell of what it used to be. And what it could have been.
On the media side, Yahoo is obviously a new media company, but it's sort of an old media company's version of a new media company. I'm generalizing here, but it seems like a vast majority of its content is simply aggregated from somewhere else. God knows it's comprehensive - pick a mainstream news topic, and you can probably find it on Yahoo! College basketball? Sure. Latest from the Mideast? In here somewhere. But it doesn't generate much new content, if any. There is no original investigative reporting done for Yahoo! Which is fine, because it's a media company, but not a journalistic enterprise.
It seems to do many of these things well. But I don't really care. I tend to find my information at sites that are either specialized, or that I know will have detailed information in a place that is easy to find. For example, on Saturday night, I wanted to find out the score of the USC-Notre Dame game, so I went to latimes.com, because I know that, for the LA Times, covering the Trojans is a high priority. I'm sure Yahoo had that as well, but it will be part of the overall college football coverage.
The economic rationale for a search engine is simple: it gives you the ability to do something that you could not otherwise do. Without search engines, the Web would be a vast wilderness, nowhere nearly as rich as it is now. The price you pay is an ad on the page of search results. A very small price for a great benefit. For the consumer, that's a sweet deal. It also makes sense for the company, because delivering the product costs very little, and it's highly scalable. The bandwidth and computing costs for each search are almost negligible.
But the economic rationale for a media aggregator like what Yahoo! has become are very different. The costs are much higher, and it's harder to differentiate your product from your competitors (who may also be your partners).
Yahoo! has many things going for it. It's at the center of a vast network; it has relationships all over the world. I don't think it's necessary for it to choose to be either a media company or a tech company; I think might be able to pull off both. But it has to be excellent at both. Right now, it's a decent tech company, and it's a decent media company. But Google is a great tech company, and the New York Times is a great media company. There are many other great tech companies, and many other great media companies. Right now, Yahoo! is neither.
Friday, April 11, 2008
Yahoo and AOL - oil and water?
From Silicon Alley Insider (for those unfamiliar with East Coast technology neighborhoods, Silicon Alley is the New York version of Silicon Valley), news that people are Yahoo are not interested in merging with AOL.
No kidding. I can't begin to imagine why that would be a good idea. I'm not thrilled with Yahoo merging with Microsoft, but at least it's a company with its act together. Let's see, the last time a large company merged with AOL, it turned into one of the worst deals in the history of corporate America. Not a precedent I find inspiring.
Yahoo should concentrate on getting its act together. Yahoo Mail is slow and buggy. I think the mistake that Yahoo made was trying to become a media company, and forgetting that it should first and foremost be a technology company. That's something that Google has not forgotten.
“Look, Microsoft would not be my first choice [as a merger partner] either. But AOL is not even my third.”
No kidding. I can't begin to imagine why that would be a good idea. I'm not thrilled with Yahoo merging with Microsoft, but at least it's a company with its act together. Let's see, the last time a large company merged with AOL, it turned into one of the worst deals in the history of corporate America. Not a precedent I find inspiring.
Yahoo should concentrate on getting its act together. Yahoo Mail is slow and buggy. I think the mistake that Yahoo made was trying to become a media company, and forgetting that it should first and foremost be a technology company. That's something that Google has not forgotten.
Saturday, March 1, 2008
Democratic Candidates and Technological Metaphors
The NY Times proposes a technological metaphor and asks "Is Obama a Mac and Clinton a PC?" It's not hard to see the analogy - Obama is young and hip, Clinton is the establishment candidate.
But I think a better analogy is between the candidates and search engines. In this comparison, Clinton is Yahoo and Obama is Google. I like both sites and I use email at both. I started out at Hotmail (which I still use), switched to Yahoo, and just recently started using Google. The differences are clear. Yahoo is superior to Hotmail, which feels a little creaky at this point, but Gmail is much better than Yahoo (except that Gmail, for reasons that seem to be utterly inexplicable, does not use folders. It uses "labels" to sort emails. I find this very frustrating.)
Clinton and Yahoo are both products of the 90's. They were both insurgents once upon a time. Both have become, in a very short time, the embodiment of a traditional way of doing things. Obama and Google, on the other hand, are both products of the 21st century. Both came from nowhere to challenge the established order.
Clinton and Yahoo both made the mistake of taking their supporters for granted, and not empowering them. I like Yahoo for a lot of things. I buy all my domain names through it, because it's ridiculously easy. I once bought dingbathermeneutics.com because I thot that sounded cool. But this blog is hosted at Blogger, which is owned by Google. I use it because I tried to set up a blog on Yahoo, and ended up feeling totally overwhelmed by the technical details. Blogger makes maintaining a blog very easy.
Clinton and Yahoo have both concentrated on media rather than technical superiority and executing a superior strategy. Hillary assumed that the air campaign, i.e. advertising, would win her the nomination. Obama, the former community organizer, understood that having people knocking on doors in their neighborhoods and making phone calls for you is vastly more effective than just paying for ads. His ground game, which requires more attention to detail, is better. Yahoo made the same mistake that Clinton did - they hired Terry Semel, a movie studio executive, to run the company. The Yahoo home page is chockablock with media items that visitors can click on and watch or read. It's a good strategy - I occasionally click on things I see there. And Hillary's strategy would have been a good one as well - if Barack Obama hadn't had a better one.
Google's strategy is obviously different just from the home page, which is almost pristine. No clutter or mess there! Unless you have an iGoogle page. But behind that pale facade, Google is much more technologically advanced than Yahoo. Most important, Google uses the technology to empower users. This blog is a great example. I once even almost sort of kind of had a blog at Yahoo - I had a Geocities account for years. But I put up all of two posts before I abandoned it, and that was years ago. Yahoo paid a fair chunk of change for Geocities way back when, but then never did anything with it. Even after other social networking sites like Friendster, MySpace or Facebook took off, Yahoo let Geocities languish. Google, of course, owns YouTube, one of the best user-enabling Web sites ever.
Obama's Web strategy, as the Times article points out, set the standard for empowering volunteers, giving them the tools to connect with other Obama fans, set up parties, raise money, etc. Very Googlish - develop cutting-edge technology, and let it loose into the world for the masses to have fun with it.
How far can I take this analogy? I'm only vaguely familiar with the different technologies that each site uses, but what I do know is that Google takes advantage of the networked aspect of the Web to find Web sites - the more links to something, the higher it is in the Google results (or so I understand). Obama's campaign is, again, something like this - by empowering individuals, it encourages them to take advantage of their own, preexisting, networks. Clinton, on the other hand, took advantage of the network that she and Bill have. That's incredibly extensive, but there are limits to how many people a couple can connect with. The Clintons have a great machine, but Obama's campaign was more organic. And it blossomed, when the Clinton's machine started to break down.
I actually got an email from Yahoo the other day about my Geocities account. It was a notice that, since I haven't used it in years, it will be deactivated in three days if I don't do something with it. Apparently someone at Yahoo is cleaning house, clearing out the old Geocities accounts that have been taking up server space for years. It's about time.
And now Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo. I have no idea why, but I'm not optimistic - Microsoft doesn't exactly have a great reputation for moving fast these days or for empowering users. Maybe Yahoo and Hillary Clinton's Presidential ambitions will have the same fate this year, one disappearing forever, one being absorbed into a vastly larger enterprise. Personally, I would be psyched if Apple bought Yahoo, but I doubt that's going to happen. All I know is that I ignored the email from Yahoo about an account I had almost forgotten that I had. Go ahead, delete my Geocities account. I like Yahoo. I have a lot of respect for Hillary Clinton. But I live in the 21st century.
But I think a better analogy is between the candidates and search engines. In this comparison, Clinton is Yahoo and Obama is Google. I like both sites and I use email at both. I started out at Hotmail (which I still use), switched to Yahoo, and just recently started using Google. The differences are clear. Yahoo is superior to Hotmail, which feels a little creaky at this point, but Gmail is much better than Yahoo (except that Gmail, for reasons that seem to be utterly inexplicable, does not use folders. It uses "labels" to sort emails. I find this very frustrating.)
Clinton and Yahoo are both products of the 90's. They were both insurgents once upon a time. Both have become, in a very short time, the embodiment of a traditional way of doing things. Obama and Google, on the other hand, are both products of the 21st century. Both came from nowhere to challenge the established order.
Clinton and Yahoo both made the mistake of taking their supporters for granted, and not empowering them. I like Yahoo for a lot of things. I buy all my domain names through it, because it's ridiculously easy. I once bought dingbathermeneutics.com because I thot that sounded cool. But this blog is hosted at Blogger, which is owned by Google. I use it because I tried to set up a blog on Yahoo, and ended up feeling totally overwhelmed by the technical details. Blogger makes maintaining a blog very easy.
Clinton and Yahoo have both concentrated on media rather than technical superiority and executing a superior strategy. Hillary assumed that the air campaign, i.e. advertising, would win her the nomination. Obama, the former community organizer, understood that having people knocking on doors in their neighborhoods and making phone calls for you is vastly more effective than just paying for ads. His ground game, which requires more attention to detail, is better. Yahoo made the same mistake that Clinton did - they hired Terry Semel, a movie studio executive, to run the company. The Yahoo home page is chockablock with media items that visitors can click on and watch or read. It's a good strategy - I occasionally click on things I see there. And Hillary's strategy would have been a good one as well - if Barack Obama hadn't had a better one.
Google's strategy is obviously different just from the home page, which is almost pristine. No clutter or mess there! Unless you have an iGoogle page. But behind that pale facade, Google is much more technologically advanced than Yahoo. Most important, Google uses the technology to empower users. This blog is a great example. I once even almost sort of kind of had a blog at Yahoo - I had a Geocities account for years. But I put up all of two posts before I abandoned it, and that was years ago. Yahoo paid a fair chunk of change for Geocities way back when, but then never did anything with it. Even after other social networking sites like Friendster, MySpace or Facebook took off, Yahoo let Geocities languish. Google, of course, owns YouTube, one of the best user-enabling Web sites ever.
Obama's Web strategy, as the Times article points out, set the standard for empowering volunteers, giving them the tools to connect with other Obama fans, set up parties, raise money, etc. Very Googlish - develop cutting-edge technology, and let it loose into the world for the masses to have fun with it.
How far can I take this analogy? I'm only vaguely familiar with the different technologies that each site uses, but what I do know is that Google takes advantage of the networked aspect of the Web to find Web sites - the more links to something, the higher it is in the Google results (or so I understand). Obama's campaign is, again, something like this - by empowering individuals, it encourages them to take advantage of their own, preexisting, networks. Clinton, on the other hand, took advantage of the network that she and Bill have. That's incredibly extensive, but there are limits to how many people a couple can connect with. The Clintons have a great machine, but Obama's campaign was more organic. And it blossomed, when the Clinton's machine started to break down.
I actually got an email from Yahoo the other day about my Geocities account. It was a notice that, since I haven't used it in years, it will be deactivated in three days if I don't do something with it. Apparently someone at Yahoo is cleaning house, clearing out the old Geocities accounts that have been taking up server space for years. It's about time.
And now Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo. I have no idea why, but I'm not optimistic - Microsoft doesn't exactly have a great reputation for moving fast these days or for empowering users. Maybe Yahoo and Hillary Clinton's Presidential ambitions will have the same fate this year, one disappearing forever, one being absorbed into a vastly larger enterprise. Personally, I would be psyched if Apple bought Yahoo, but I doubt that's going to happen. All I know is that I ignored the email from Yahoo about an account I had almost forgotten that I had. Go ahead, delete my Geocities account. I like Yahoo. I have a lot of respect for Hillary Clinton. But I live in the 21st century.
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