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I’d build the best, most intelligent ad platform. Yahoo’s less sophisticated users could make Y! so much more than Google per impression if their ads were better targeted and they had more advertisers on board. To do that they need better employees, though…

Fire Jerry Yang, again, just to make sure.

I’d sell to MS before the shares hit 50 cents a share.

Stop trying to copy market leaders (google search, facebook, etc). And focus on the Yahoo! tools/sites that people love (flickr).

Build an iPod-killer!

Resign and take the golden parachute. That’s a mess I want no part of.

Focus on being a web toolkit.

Immediately hire someone named Jerry Yin, and everything will turn around…

I’d fix your rss feed so I wouldn’t have to click through to here to read that 1 liner.

1°) communicate on the “being an alternative” 2°) externalize less used features 3°) make the visitor feels he’s a part of the process, maybe like ranknoodle do with its “vote” feature (which i find genius)

Like Scott said, focus on the good stuff rather than playing catch-up.

Also note that Flickr seems a more independent entity from Yahoo! and it’s way more focused. Maybe other parts of Yahoo! could benefit from being more focused in their functionality, and also less a small piece of the huge behemoth that is Yahoo! The idea of a single, comprehensive “internet portal” is dead to me.

But hey, I don’t really use Yahoo!’s stuff, I just like doling out irresponsible advice :-)

Go all in on the strategy to build the process infrastructure for cloud computing.

And make sure the Chief Yahoo has an ankle bracelet on him so people can know when he’s coming

Yahoo is making money, they are profitable. Stop trying to do the “me too” reaction, and create a direction, then execute that. You don’t have to be #1, just need to be the most profitable, and an open platform to grow 3rd party support.

Focus on the core competencies, buy some stock back, and retool existing assets to generate more revenue.

Core competencies like mail, search, and news need more attention. Strike a deal with Nintendo or Sony to be the primary search and mail provider on their consoles. Partner with other content holders to integrate their content, such as: show snippets of books at Amazon that match search criteria. Their products are good, just not popular. Nothing wrong with being #2 so long as you’re damn good at it.

Buy some stock back while it’s down. It’s a gamble but the stock trend is already in a downward spiral, dropping further won’t make headlines. If the stock goes up, then that may help to remove the smell of death, increase investor confidence, and curb some negative press.

Retooling assets like Flikr or De.licio.us would be a good move. Raise your hand if you know what you get with a paid Flikr or De.licio.us account? (No googling the answer, that’s cheating.) I have no clue what benefit a paid Flikr account has, and that needs to change… either the benefits aren’t good enough for people to talk/blog about or Yahoo’s dropped the ball on advertising the paid plans.

Last… I’d spin off the least profitable assets. They may have better luck as a smaller, more focused entity.

That’s what I’d do.

Id turn it around by building apps that help other people/businesses build their own e.g. Ning.

I would make customer service more personal and let employees chat to customers all over the place to help them out.

Lastly id get these talented people to get into risk mode and just try stuff, less hours, less features more wii time etc.

I would stop trying to beat Google at their game. Then I would focus my efforts on being the best in the world at no more then 2 or 3 things. Say “no” to everything else. Focus is not only better for customers but also helps the employees channel their efforts on a few things rather then many.

When Steve Jobs took over Apple that is exactly what he did. He took the 40+ products they had and cut it down to 4. He reorganized the organizational chart so people knew who to report to (7 executives that reported to him, that’s it). He was sickened by Apple’s inability to execute and started holding people responsible for completing projects on time. If they didn’t perform he let them go. He was focused, so was Jack Welch.

Then after I got my team to focus I would wipe out the home page. Talk about sensory overload. Simplify and focus. Choice is not always a good thing, especially when I don’t know what I want or what I should be doing on the site.

Go to Disneyland!

i’d organize a winner take all game of texas hold em with brin, page, gates, ellison, joy, jobs, zuckerberg and bezos. just get it over with.

If you look at Yahoo, they are the market leaders in several areas – they need to focus on these areas.

1. Fantasy Sports – they are far & above everyone else in the game, more content and they’ll kill the competition.

2. Yahoo! Finance – this is one of their best assets, they need to make it more Mint.Com like

3. Answers – This could be REALLY good, if they worked on it more.

4. MapQuest – they’ve been beaten by Google here, give us a reason to come back

5. Mail – I’ve never used Yahoo Mail, but I know some that swear by it.

Everything else in that sidebar isn’t going places, focus on a few things and do them great, instead being pretty good across the board.

I’d meet everyone in the company and hear their story, ideas, frustrations, complaints, ambitions. Then, using the resources of a huge organization like Yahoo!, I’d give as many “green lights” as possible financially and become the #1 cheerleader for all those great people who have been STUCK in a stale system.

STOP wearing purple, the rest will follow.

I’d clean house at all levels (upper and middle management especially) of all the conventional overachievers that have fattened the ranks over the last 7+ years that yahoo has gone down hill. I’d then rehire mostly recent college grads from anywhere else but Stanford.

The first thing (after familiarizing myself with the inner workings of course), would be to start trimming the fat. Yahoo! is a great organization with a lot of power; however, the bulk that they’ve obtained through the years is unbelievable. Y!’s gold is buried deep in their community, and I would take a huge leap at trying to dig up that potential.

I’d ditch the idea that search needs to be done in house and sign a deal with Google to implement their technologies. With Google under the hood, they can focus on the “Search User Experience” a bit more and figure out a more elegant approach to advertising. As mentioned above, I definitely agree that Yahoo needs to begin monetizing their “real estate” a bit more, and they can easily do that by creating an ad-network that rivals AdWords/AdSense.

There’s plenty of things that can be done, I’m hoping the new CEO is a bit more radical than Yang and begins to implement some of the ideas shared here.

Video, video, video

I would buy an RFID company and build the world’s largest web based tracking system. Then MSFT , GOOG, AMAZON and the rest would have to go through me to sell anything.

Focus on doing fewer things better.

Do something similar to what Steve did when he came back to Apple. Milk revenue from your best apps (Flickr, Finance, etc) and work on the next greatest web thing. Of course, this plan would probably hinge on having a visionary leader…

Or, if not that, just trim fat and focus on what they’re good at.

Fire everyone, and outsource to India.

1 – Find out what businesses want from the portfolio of products that Yahoo! currently supports.

2 – Find out which and more importantly how products in Yahoo!’s portfolio are being used by web visitors.

3 – Consolidate products based on steps 1 and 2 to reinforce a core suite of products.

4 – Yahoo! appliance for businesses. Not just search, but an “Intranet” in an appliance format. Now that Yahoo! is focused on interoperability of their platform this would be a great way to get instant infrastructure.

5 – Use the consumer level products available freely on the web to begin developing micro-payment tools. Like Yahoo! Mail, but wish it did X, Y, & Z? Well…buy a developer license from Yahoo! and develop a plugin that you can then turn around and sell to people who use Yahoo! Mail. Basically taking the Greasemonkey concept and monetizing it based off of Yahoo!’s platform.

That’d be my 5 first tasks as the head of Yahoo!

Focus on strengths and core products (Search, Mail, Maps, Ads, developer tools). Operate everything else as independent subsidiaries that get preferential access to Yahoo resources (like infrastructure and APIs). For stuff that isn’t working, sell it or spin it off.

+1 on wtf’s suggestion. RSS isn’t dead yet 37signals, don’t make me click through to read your posts.

Agreed on RSS . Just because Jason doesn’t have the self-discipline to use it effectively doesn’t mean nobody else does.

Yahoo should capitalize on its assets it already has. The main one it has is an incredible amount of frontpage traffic. There are millions and millions of people who have a mental model that you access “the Internet” starting with Yahoo, and only Yahoo.

What can you do with 100 million eyeballs coming to you every day?

Hire Jerry Seinfeld to do 4 commercials… wait a second. Scratch that.

Sell to Apple. Though I think Apple should buy Sun first.

Answer:Dont no!!!

Yahoo has grown big!!!Any big company change is toucgh and innovation is less..thats a fact..Google one day might be like that ..

Having said that whoe ever would lead it to form a leadership council which can connect with Employees and Consumer :-) thats the essential of the business and develop services for them….

May be 80-20 Work rule at Yahoo? May be Focssing exclusivelu on mobile based apps :-))

I would try to find out what Yahoo actually does.

Get a fat stack of in-the-money options, fire lots of workers, jack up short term earnings, maybe acquire something hot for a ridiculous amount of money, and then sell to Microsoft.

I’d take a big step back and figure out what exactly Yahoo means and what Yahoo is trying to be. Is it a media company? search? advertising? tech? Figure out what they are and then relentlessly focus on it so they can plan on how they’re going to lead that industry for the next decade and beyond.

Because of their lack of focus, they are lukewarm in every area and are being eroded by better more specialized competitors. Focusing and aligning all of their resources to dominate certain industries has to be a better strategy than fighting a losing battle on 20 different fronts simultaneously.

1. Re-think why there’s more than 10.000 employees at Yahoo, get rid of people who are there because of the prestige of working for a big company

2. Re-structure everything. Focus on the core, and for everything else, let them run as parallel independent entities, like Flickr or del.icio.us.

3. Pick a big project to work on and implement it, instead of announcing dozens of iniatives and actually doing them half-hearted or not going till the finish

Ask for a government bailout. Yahoo is too big to fail. :P

Yahoo! I didn’t even know they were still around. My grandma doesn’t even use their stuff. There’s no glory riding a dead horse.

first thing I would do is have them buy my startup for $3.2 billion.

It’s a rails app, so it’s worth it.

I would split the company to self managed units. Cross funding between these should be minimal. The unit that is slacking goes under without too much regret. New projects should still be encouraged but should fail fast if they don’t show early signs of success. Of course I am not qualified (nor willing) to run such a huge operation but I though I’d join the party.

‘GO PRIVATE ’ and stop worrying about the [excessive] perpetual growth model of a public company.

find out what makes money, start doing that.

1. Review all products and services. 2. Kill/Sell anything that we suck at or doesn’t make sense. 3. Break the company into 4 divisions — Apps, Content, Search, Social. 4. Spend as much as we can recruiting the the best. 5. Fire anyone that is satisfied with the status quo. 6. Market and Advertise — Think Purple. (cow) 7. Sell keywords for less than Google does. 8. Sell a chunk of the search business to Microsoft. 9. Do a windows integration deal with Microsoft. 10. Hire Seth Godin as CMO , pay him a lot.

P.S. Probably buy LinkedIn for $1 Billion and Digg for 100 million if we had it in cash from the MS deal.

LMAO at Super B’s comment. No more replies were needed after that…

I’m not sure what it’s like to be a huge, useless internet company. I do have a few ideas I’d kick around, though:

- Rebuild the search engine. Make it fast. Make it simple. Make it better than Google. (Yes, that’s possible.)

- Take on Sony, Amazon and the nation’s floundering news agencies and broker a deal that will make good news content profitable via adsense.

- Review the lessons learned from LAUNCHcast and build a simple, subscription-based music service that sites like last.fm and Rhapsody almost got right.

- Acquire Mint and Zappos.

Any one of these is going to take anywhere from 3 months to a year to do right and each one would require the full attention of the company’s talent. This means:

1. Firing senior management.

2. Hiring new execs from outside to manage the new initiatives.

3. Promoting proven middle managers from successful units such as flickr and adsense to protect profitability and promote an effective culture.

4. Refactoring mercilessly.

I’d also think about rebranding – starting with the removal of that stupid exclamation point.

This guy just picked the wrong company years ago: “What would I do? I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders,” Michael Dell said before a crowd of several thousand IT executives.

Surprised there’s virtually nothing mentioned here about mobile. In general, Yahoo does mobile really well.

Ah yes, all the armchair analysts.

It’s too late for Yahoo! since they have already gone the dread route of an IPO . It’s also too late for Google and other public companies who have shareholders for the sole reason of profit; they just haven’t hit the roof quite yet. It’s maths, baby.

What a crazy world, where a company can be both intensely popular and profitable enough to provide a good lifestyle for the entire team, yet considered “in trouble” because it’s not gobbling up the world as greedily as that silly class of people (the class, not the people), called shareholders, demand.

Do a few things really great rather than trying to be good across all the stuff you have. That’s not going to work. You have some really nice stuff like Web toolkit, Answers, Finance. Just focus and do it right…

I guess my other post got deleted or never was sent through.

Basically, IMO , Yahoo has some redundancy.

Why have delicious.com and yahoo bookmarks or myweb.yahoo

why have social features in flickr different from Yahoo Answers, or Yahoo Mail. Consolidate and pick the best of breed.

Yahoo is dead. Google lead the search and gaining all the functions provided by Yahoo’s portal. Google just let you customized all the Google services. There is really nothing left at Yahoo. There are no talnet left at Yahoo. Look how many people already walked after Yang take over as CEO . For example, flicker founders already or will be gone.

For those who think hiring young talents will save Yahoo. yeah, keep dreaming buddy. Yahoo can’t create anything new that’s why Yahoo buy site like flicker.

I wonder if one of the above comments is Jerry posting as someone else.

Perhaps this is Jerry.

Most people on here don’t have a clue on what would make Yahoo turn around because they are not familiar with it’s internals, including myself… so I won’t pretend to know what’s best for Y!

With that said, here’s where I’d start:

First thing that needs to be done is decide what the mission is. Is it to increase profitability, market-share or investor value?

They are not all mutually exclusive but they do determine where people & resources need to be directed.

If the goal is to increase profitability, you’ve got two objectives: more advertisers and more revenue from advertisers. To achieve either, they need to step into the shoe of their advertisers and focus on helping them make more money. Google has done this in many ways over the years. Multiple ad testing, google analytics, google landing page optimizers, etc etc. They need to live for their advertisers.

If your goal is to increase market-share, they need to decide who they are for consumers.

If they want to be a Google-killer, they have to out-Google Google. Which means they need to be cleaner and deliver better results.

I suspect that they can’t out-Google Google. They would have done it by now if they could have.

What they need is a more attract value proposition than “clean fast relevant search engine”. That’s a tall order.

They had Local Search going for them but they blew it by not telling everyone about it. They gave Google time to catch up and now people don’t have a clue which is better or worst.

They need to take bold steps. Offer what Google cannot offer. And this won’t come from some guy/gal who just gets a bright idea. It’s something where you have to throw a bunch of things on the wall and keep a careful eye on what sticks and what kind of sticks. Their open strategy by pay off big here if it works.

If the goal is to increase investor value (aka stock price), they need to be honest. I know nothing about dealing with investors of a publicly traded company but I know that being open and honest builds confidence in you as a person. Once you admit you have a problem, one that could possibly be fatal, you can move to fixing it.

Get rid of the shareholders. Can I do that?

1) Take the company private

2) Focus on Mobile Web, Flickr and Delicious

3) Create software for mobile (iphone, blackberry, etc..)

3) Jump start it’s own cloud computing