[noahm]

One additional thing I'd like to see: Really strongly encourage dogfooding. One of the most depressing things I experienced while working at Yahoo was when I'd look around and see all my co-workers using competing email, search, maps, etc products. People looked at me funny when they noticed that I had taken some time to configure my.yahoo.com and set it as my home page. There was no sense of ownership of the various products, so nobody really cared whether or not they worked well.

On a related note, on the rare occasion when somebody did try using yahoo properties and they found an issue or wanted to suggest a feature (e.g. more powerful mail filtering capabilities), the common refrain that typically came back was "You're not the target audience." It was as if yahoo only wanted to cater to the most basic use case. Yahoo needs hiding behind this "not the target audience" crap and challenge itself to make a product that is both powerful enough to appeal to sophisticated users and simple enough to appeal to users with more basic needs. It can be done, and I'd point to Google and Apple as examples of companies that are enjoying much success right now because they've seen the value of it.