Taking Yahoo! forward - Yodel Anecdotal

Taking Yahoo! forward - Yodel Anecdotal:

When I joined Yahoo! five years ago, I found a company with incredible assets (huge audience, strong brand, healthy balance sheet), great potential, and a team filled with determination and a fighting spirit. But the company faced challenging economic conditions that pummeled the Internet sector and was itself losing money. Yahoo!’s original strategy of “get big fast” (building audience and brand) needed to change. Yahoo! was ready to enter its second phase. We reshaped our sales organization, beefed up our bench, simplified our management operations, and, over the course of several years, executed several transformational initiatives in areas like broadband, search monetization and algorithmic search. Our changes paid off as we later posted quarter after quarter of record growth in audience and revenues.

Yahoo! is now entering what I call its third phase — one focused on customers. We’re seeing the competitive and advertising landscapes evolve yet again and today we announced a realignment that we believe will let Yahoo! capture the major growth opportunities ahead. Simply put, we’re aligning our business around two key customer groups — our audience and our advertisers and publishers — supported by innovative technology. We’re creating three operating groups — Audience, Advertiser & Publisher, and Technology — to increase our strategic focus and accountability, speed decision-making, emphasize scalable platforms and improve resource allocation. Here’s the press release.

Well, if nothing else, give Semel cred for popping up on Yodel Anecdotal and coming clean on this. Wow.

Zod Nazem, our CTO and a key executive team member, will lead our Technology Group. We intend to focus our engineering investments and move towards more integrated product development teams. We’ve also created a new Platform & Infrastructure sub-group, which will build high-impact, global platforms for everything from advertising to social media.

Oh, and FWIW, here is your "death to silos" department, where most of the potential efficiencies are.