Yahoo Shows Strategic No-No

Terry Semel is out and company co-founder Jerry Yang is in as Yahoo CEO. After a reorganization in December, continued disappointing earnings (while Semel earned an estimated $71.1 million last year, as estimated by the Wall Street Journal), and operational snafus, the company felt the need for changes.

it's quite a change in fortunes. According to the Journal, the man originally was a savior:

Mr. Semel, 64 years old, is widely credited with helping to focus a foundering Yahoo following his 2001 arrival and helping it ride the recovery in online advertising. The Sunnyvale, Calif., company is one of the largest sellers of such ads, and has played a key role in leading some name-brand companies to increase their marketing on the Web.

Then key managers left, they weren't replaced, the company couldn't digest the acquisition of an Internet ad platform company quickly enough, and things generally went badly when Google continued to out pace Yahoo. So now there's talk of possibly selling the company, or partnering, or ... something.

I wonder if management will really take a page out of Google's book. It's not to copy, but to better understand how Google gets so much right where it counts - with customers. They actually seem to listen, because nothing else would explain how they would continue to pick up share in areas filled with the fickle. An audience of over 100 million is a significant asset. Instead of playing catch-up in search and search advertising, why not talk to the customers big-time? Find out what they want? Not through focus groups, but by getting managers to actually talk to the people the company deals with, learn what they want, what they like, what's missing. Now that would be a radical solution.