Well, I don't hold it, so I have not done the research and am speaking from a place of ignorance investment-wise.
But I am very interested in tech, and looking at Yahoo! in a broad sense I think they need to shift their focus from short term profits to making their core offerings a)more functional for their users, b)more beautiful for their users, and c)integrated with the other services and platforms their users use.
I mean, look at their search page. It is literally slathered in adds and links to...god only knows what. Seemingly random news articles? Buttons that say "OMG!" (where will that take me, I wonder?), auto-site links, and hilariously, a 'Trending' section. I almost want to cry.
Now think about a search customer navigating to Yahoo! to perform a search, -that's all they want to do. And they see this.
Same goes for their mail product. You have users that you are serving, but what you are offering them is just as comically abysmal. It's offensive. It's information overload. It looks like shit.
They are, as a company, in a position to better offer some core services like search, mail, photo storage and sharing to an incredibly large audience in a beautiful, user experience enhancing way. I'd love to see them seize that opportunity instead of just slathering their products with garbage to chase short term ad revenue (destroying the user experience in the process and driving people away in the long term), or failing completely to nurture and exploit their better properties like Flickr.
Yahoo! needs to get back to basics and fix those things before it starts moving on to grander ambitions imho. They do that, and users will appreciate it. They will stay with them. New users will come into the fold. Stem the flow of users leaving their properties, bring new users in with core service enhancements, then leverage that audience as they expand into areas of what amounts to pure speculation.
Great points. I definitely agree that the visual styling of Yahoo! remains in a web 1.5 era and I'm sure Marissa Meyer will have her fair share to say about it in the coming months. After all, Google's famous white background is largely considered one of Marissa's influences.
Other than the design aspect - Yahoo!'s web technology is largely, for the lack of a better word, 'adequate'. Their search bar searches well (powered by Bing), their mail client sends mail, and Flickr is still a great service for image consumption and storage.
What of their 'lifestyle' or 'media' portals? For instance Yahoo! Answers, Finance, Auto, Sports (Fantasy Sports as well as Sports news) etc? These are all great Yahoo! product areas in their own right. What do you think users would say to Yahoo! making a media play similar to what AOL has done?
One gripe of mine is Match.com, another Yahoo! property. It seems largely untapped. It isn't widely branded as part of the Yahoo! portfolio (lacking the trademark Yahoo! Purple design scheme, for one), and it seems it has largely operated independent of its parent company in the past. I think Yahoo! should either choose to do something with this website and have it mean something to the rest of the Yahoo! family of products, or sell it off and use the money to fund other ventures.
But I am very interested in tech, and looking at Yahoo! in a broad sense I think they need to shift their focus from short term profits to making their core offerings a)more functional for their users, b)more beautiful for their users, and c)integrated with the other services and platforms their users use.
I mean, look at their search page. It is literally slathered in adds and links to...god only knows what. Seemingly random news articles? Buttons that say "OMG!" (where will that take me, I wonder?), auto-site links, and hilariously, a 'Trending' section. I almost want to cry.
Now think about a search customer navigating to Yahoo! to perform a search, -that's all they want to do. And they see this.
Same goes for their mail product. You have users that you are serving, but what you are offering them is just as comically abysmal. It's offensive. It's information overload. It looks like shit.
They are, as a company, in a position to better offer some core services like search, mail, photo storage and sharing to an incredibly large audience in a beautiful, user experience enhancing way. I'd love to see them seize that opportunity instead of just slathering their products with garbage to chase short term ad revenue (destroying the user experience in the process and driving people away in the long term), or failing completely to nurture and exploit their better properties like Flickr.
Yahoo! needs to get back to basics and fix those things before it starts moving on to grander ambitions imho. They do that, and users will appreciate it. They will stay with them. New users will come into the fold. Stem the flow of users leaving their properties, bring new users in with core service enhancements, then leverage that audience as they expand into areas of what amounts to pure speculation.