Back in the day, choices for Web-based emails boiled down squarely to two – Yahoo and Hotmail. Yahoo surged ahead because it was also a search engine, and people going to the Internet for the first time, liked its fresh, colourful graphical user interface.
I do.
Great products, wrong timing.
As were the numerous other Web services it trotted out, pre-2010, that are now defunct, by the way.
But still other services and online properties came along, and today it commands one of the largest Web audiences in the world, at 575 million visitors a month, to its properties on the World Wide Web.
So, what’s this about ex-Googler Marissa Mayer coming along, snapping up companies left, right and centre to beef up Yahoo’s portfolio and user base? Doesn’t she have enough developers in her stable of over 15,000 employees to build her own?
So, she has done a commendable job stabilising the company that has been fraught with demoralising and unsuccessful business models. I also think Yahoo needs to be around, if only to throw a spanner in the works when it comes to Google’s monopoly on online search; Yahoo during July 2013 surpassed Google in terms of the number of US visitors to its Web sites.
But in this fast-paced world of instant gratification, and ever changing consumer zeitgeist, Yahoo is still moving like a slow, lumbering giant, something that is exacerbated by acquisitions that are taking time to integrate with the company, and taking too much time to play out over.
Whatever happened to that agile development thinking of building fast, and failing faster – building minimum viable products and getting back feedback for improvements as quickly as possible? This approach does not need to apply to just development methodology, but business models as well.
And now, Mayer’s decision to not fire her employees has backfired. At the end of her rope, she now has to comply with shareholders’ wishes, and will be letting workers go, according to recent reports. What will she be left with after all the rounds of “slaughter”?
IT BYTES BACK! says: Yahoo does build out its own services, too but the time to build fast and fail faster has never been more crucial for this Internet giant, which seems to be taking its own sweet time.
