Yahoo has been in trouble for years. Now things are beginning to catch up to the company.
Yahoo has been cutting costs since Bartz took over. Unfortunately for Bartz she took over the company at the beginning of a major recession.
It should not be a surprise to anyone that Yahoo is suffering during the recession because everyone is. Carol Bartz appears to be doing all of the right things in terms of cost control and fiscal responsibility. I give her a lot of credit. She took over a company that simply jumped off a cliff last year. As for the CFO admitting that the future is a bit cloudy is not an understatement but simply a fact. The future is cloudy for everyone. I give Yahoo credit for handing out the typical line of “the future is bright”. Yahoo has been spiraling down since Google entered the scene.
The real questions Bartz needs to deal with are: What are your strategic plan and tactical plan for Yahoo? What do you want Yahoo to be in 2010?
So far, Bartz appears to be doing everything necessary to stabilize the company. Now she needs to set a path for the company. Is Yahoo just a search engine making money off of advertising? Is Yahoo going to be something more than a search engine?
First Yahoo had to deal with Google and now it has to deal with Bing. Truthfully, I don’t even understand why Microsoft would want to do a deal with Yahoo unless the deal is lopsided towards a Microsoft win. Could we be looking at Microsoft acquiring Yahoo for a song? Who knows? At this point, unless Bartz has some grandiose plan to reenergize Yahoo, I would say all Microsoft has to do is wait and snatch up Yahoo at a fraction of the price that Jerry Yang had turned down in early 2008.
So what is Yahoo’s great recovery plan? The waiting is killing the company, not the competition. I am all for being deliberate in one’s actions but there is such a thing as taking too long.
The company needs an extreme makeover. The question now is what should that makeover be?
Should Yahoo be a Google or a Facebook or a YouTube or some combination of all of them? How do you do this without spending money? Does Bartz have a war chest full of cash? Are the cost savings going to be used for the restructuring?