Yahoo! Is Peanut Butter

November 18th, 2006

This is a really interesting article at the Wall Street Journal, written by a senior VP (Brad Garlinghouse) at Yahoo!. It’s basically an internal memo meant to be a wake-up call to Yahoo! employees, as the once mighty Web 1.0 behemoth is seeming more and more a second fiddle to Google, and arguably even Microsoft and Amazon.

There’s a lot of meat to the memo’s “peanut butter” theme, namely that as Yahoo! has grown in size, with it has come bureaucracy slowing everything down. There are different divisions doing the same thing (redundancy) and sometimes even competing with each other. Blogger J. Leroy observed this confounding lack of synergy between the different Yahoo! properties a while back, saying, “The individual elements of Yahoo are great, but they are nothing together.” The result is a Yahoo! is spread too thin (hence the peanut butter analogy), trying to be average at everything and in turn being expert at nothing.

I can only speak about Yahoo! from a user’s perspective. I’ve wondered myself why I never notice anything exciting coming out of the company. If there are cool projects, I certainly don’t hear about them – there’s a strange lack of “buzz.”

As an example of this, my eyes opened the most when Garlinghouse lists some competing or redundant Yahoo! properties:

“YME vs. Musicmatch, Flickr vs. Photos, Deli.cio.us vs. myweb, YMG video vs. Search video, Front page vs. YMG”…

…I don’t even know what he’s talking about. Out of that list, I recognize only Flickr and deli.cio.us, but as for the rest, I have no clue (I’m left scratching my head: YME? Is that Yahoo! My Everything?). There is zero awareness here. And as for the two properties I have heard of (and use sometimes), they were acquisitions. They weren’t even developed at Yahoo! internally.

All the projects that exist at Yahoo! that aren’t helping Yahoo! on its primary mission (whatever that is) really need to justify their existence. I’m just a user, but if I have can’t define a particular Yahoo! division, it’s a safe bet Mr. Middle America USA, presumably Yahoo!’s target market, has even less of a clue.

I sometimes think it’s my fault for not paying attention to Yahoo!, but then say, no, it’s not my job to follow a brand. It’s the company’s job to get their message out and explain to me why I should care.

So the peanut butter analogy makes sense to me, as it somewhat explains my confusion regarding Yahoo! In addition to all the other problems, the peanut butter is likely slowing down their ability to define (and hence advertise) their very brand.

Here’s hoping someone in charge at Yahoo! takes this memo – and the drastic suggestions contained within – seriously. I have a Yahoo! ID gathering dust that I’d love to use.

For some additional reading on the subject, check out (paidContent.org) (Michael Parekh on IT) (Slashdot). And here’s a very specific list of suggested next steps for Yahoo! from the Breakout Performance blog. Finally, here’s some thoughts on this specific memo from J. Leroy.

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