Valleywag
After Terry Semel abruptly resigned as Yahoo's CEO, founder Jerry Yang promised precipitous action — the hackneyed "100-day plan." But now, we hear that his new strategy is anything but swift in execution. Codenamed "Project Apex," the solution to Yahoo's woes centers around building a better version of Google's AdSense. AdSense, of course, is the service that places ads on third-party websites, matching the ads to their content. Yahoo already has a similar service called Yahoo Publisher Network, but it's "a clusterfuck," according to one Yahoo insider. The only problem? Yahoo's tech team thinks they can finish it in three years. Three years! (What's the average tenure of a Yahoo executive today? Will anyone be around to see this through?)
Project Apex, which may be the subject of a rumored Yahoo leadership meeting set for tomorrow, is not to be confused with Panama. Panama is the recently released but also painfully long-in-the-making supposed Yahoo savior, an ad-targeting system similar to Google's AdWords, used primarily for Yahoo's own sites. As a revamp of the current Yahoo Publisher Network, Project Apex might help boost Yahoo's ad revenues generated on partner sites, but it hardly seems like the boldest of moves.
We suspect that the uncreative and safe nature of this new direction stems from its hasty assembly. When asked about Yang's supposed 100-day plan, a friend confessed:
The punchline is that there is no plan. Yang was just saying it in a conversational, rally-the-troops sort of way, not realizing that the Street and the Valley were going to to mark that date in red ink and count the days.... The first rule of being CEO: don't set your company up to fail.
Comments
There's no evidence to prove that they are good at monetizing third party web sites. After it leaked that they've been considering outsourcing search to Google, and since Content Match and Yahoo Publisher Network have been a disaster, why should anyone believe "next time" will be better?
Hey, kids, here's a heads-up: there's a lovefest happening down in Sunnyvale and until the smoke blows away, probably from the force of an implosion, it's business as usual. Come on, you had Semel try to dial it in, in between flights; you have Yang, one of the original gurus, doing a negative gravity thing; and you have Sue Decker surrounding herself with an investment banking that wouldn't know a good piece of code if they swallowed it for breakfast. Thousands of developers of varying stripes and talents, a proprietary development framework that gets re-authored every six months, a customer base that's used to getting everything free, and an ad platform that changes directions like the Titanic, only without the iceberg. What's not clear here? The color of the beads, or the scent of the incense?
@SGGRF: I never heard it leaked that they were actually considering outsourcing search to google (again) -- I've heard/read a dozen pro-google blogtards, and a few analysts suggest that however. Do you have a reference? I probably missed it.
(Sorry, No time to wade thru the echo chamber of search results on the topic).
An anticipated major overhaul at Yahoo! appears unlikely as a result of a wide-ranging strategic review being undertaken by the company.
In the light of recent market share losses to Google and a 19 per cent decrease in revenues for the three months to June, new chief executive Jerry Yang said in July he would deliver a new strategic plan for the company within 100 days.
However, the Wall Street Journal Online reports that Mr Yang has played down the importance of the deadline and that no big announcements are to be made. The website suggests that Yahoo! is looking at the option of outsourcing its search-advertising activity to either Google or Microsoft.
In a statement to the publication, Yahoo! said: "Jerry Yang and [Yahoo! president] Sue Decker are committed to making significant changes to the way Yahoo! operates and to sharpening its focus on key initiatives that will enable the company to improve its performance."
Yahoo! announced a nine per cent increase in profits for the three months to June 2007, despite decreasing revenues.
You're way off on this one Megan. I think you need a better Yahoo! source.
Yahoo internal employee here, the top secret project is not named APEX. It's K-PAX. Like the movie:
[www.imdb.com]
interesting topic. a quick search for the term "apax" will turn up a worldwide strategic management partner for the process of company "buy-outs".
@dogburp: You can contact me at megan@valleywag.com. Let me where I'm "way off," and I'll correct it.
Apex has to take 3 years to complete because of the sheer amount of work involved and the amount of people it will impact. It's a must if they want to grow the business. At the time I left, the company was suffering severe problems in employee morale due to their poor reward and incentive programs. On top of that is the ridiculous extreme matrix structure that points everyone into too many diverging directions instead of aligning everyone to their common goals. All of these problems are likely to delay their ability to make any major changes anytime soon.
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