Yahoo!'s New Mission: It's About the People
Google's mission statement has long been "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Last night, Yahoo! announced their new mission, "to connect people to their passions, communities, and the world’s knowledge." While Google emphasizes the data, Yahoo! will emphasize the people (the Google also recently debuted a new tagline: "Search, Ads and Apps," so maybe they're more about the money).
Last November, an internal memo at Yahoo! from SVP Brad Garlinghouse, dubbed the "Peanut Butter Manifesto" by the press, called on the company "to boldly and definitively declare what we are and what we are not." It seems that Yahoo! has decided that they're less about search, and more about community.
As part of the new realignment Yahoo! formed a new "Network Division," that puts "the majority of Yahoo!’s consumer-facing products," including Mail, Messenger, Groups, Bix, Flickr, Web Search, Answers, News & Information and Entertainment business units, the Yahoo.com home page and My Yahoo, under one roof. That appears to be pretty much everything.
One of the most interesting points in Yahoo!'s new vision is that they want to "leverage our assets to build the most relevant, comprehensive, dynamic, and open repository of knowledge and content on the Web." Yahoo's Executive Vice President, Jeff Weiner, who penned the announcement, emphasized that Yahoo! is excited about opening up their content to other web publishers. This is something that Yahoo! has already excelled at. The Yahoo! Developer Network offers comprehensive APIs for most of their services, and according to ProgrammableWeb, Yahoo! offers more APIs than Google, and is second among the large web properties in terms of mashups created using their technology and content.
"One of the things we’re most excited about is the concept of 'open,' and all of the potential we have yet to tap by opening up some of the most trafficked pages on Yahoo.com to the highest quality publishers on the Web, regardless of their size," says Weiner, promising more information soon. It will be interesting to see in what new ways Yahoo! plans to open their content.
Weiner says the reorganization of Yahoo! is complete, and indeed many of the things Garlinghouse called for in the "Peanut Butter Manifesto" have been done (despite Terry Semel's claim that the reorganization of Yahoo "wasn't all about peanut butter"). Some redundancies still exist in the Yahoo! network (Del.icio.us vs. MyWeb comes to mind), but the company appears to have endeavored to remove the major redundancies that pitted business units against one another. Google will continue to dominate in search for the foreseeable future, but will focusing on people be enough to get Yahoo! back on track? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.
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Yes I think this is a good start - Yahoo is finding itself finally.
Their new content is online poker :) Sure thing it brings people together. What else? porno industry, maybe :)
Its great that they've finally got a plan. Theyve made some decent acquisitions to back up this new "people" mentality (flickr, upcoming). Now its just a matter of whether they can execute.
So let us hope, that they love our new projects :-)
So what did Flickr, one of the best examples of passion and community among Yahoo's sites, do yesterday? It deleted content by a popular photographer, along with the story that went with it and 450+ comments.
I just blogged about this at (will the link show up?):
http://changingway.org/2007/05/16/yahoo-people-flickr/
I like this move by Yahoo - content and community is their core strength and so they should focus on it.
Andrew, that "mistake" from Flickr is a worrying one. Let's hope that kind of censorship doesn't happen again.
It's a good, solid piece of organizational consolidation - but it isn't necessarily a strategy. And whilst it's a nice vision, the idea of leveraging their assets to build the most "relevant, comprehensive, dynamic, and open repository of knowledge and content on the Web" could equally well be, say Wikipedia. Good but no Google.
The timing of Yahoo's new mission statement - "to connect people to their passions, communities, and the world’s knowledge" - seems very unfortunate . At the same time that the mission statement was announced, Yahoo/Flickr chose to censure by deletion a young female, talented photographer, when she told her story of trying to regain her rights to photographs that had been illegally sold by a company on eBay.
I fully agree with Andrew's well formulated argument, that Yahoo's new mission is definitely not in line with their actions recently. Quite of few of the comments these last two days have witnessed that Yahoo/Flickr deletion policy is nothing new.
Who will believe in the attractive mission words "to connect people to their passions, communities, and the world’s knowledge" after what has happened these last days? It would be sad if many Flickr-fans now choose to leave Flickr-home for other similar photowebbs. After what has happened lately, we are many that hope to see some concrete action from Yahoo/Flickr that demonstrates their true intention to live up to their new mission statement.
I think this is a great move by Yahoo!. Their previous lack of focus resulted in coming in 2nd or 3rd place to the other big dogs in the innovation arena.
A new mission and restructure was necessary to set them apart and enable them to regain some leadership in the industry. It takes resolve to redefine your organization and expose your faults and I think this is a step in the right direction.
If you haven't read Brad Garlinghouse's Peanut Butter Manifesto, it's worth a look.