The Great Yahoo Bleed-Out?
by
on June 18, 2008,
It seems from watching my news feeds that company executives from Yahoo and its properties are fleeing as fast as they can, like rats from a sinking ship. You can hardly blame them. Yahoo has been a shining example of what not to do the past few months - hardly confidence inspiring.
The two most recent departees are Flickr 's founders Catrina Fake and Stewart Butterfield. Flickr being one of my favorite of Yahoo' s cool properties, the news got my attention in a way other recent departures did not. It is one thing when members of the executive staff at Yahoo itself get restless, and quite another when the anxiety trickles down to the executives of the properties it holds.
Over the last few months as Microsoft tried a hostile takeover of Yahoo and Yahoo resisted, even against the wishes of shareholders, Yahoo finally found itself spurred to utilize its many properties to their full potential. This is a shining example of "too little, too late". Yahoo should have been maximizing properties like del.icio.us, Flickr and others from the start. It should be a crime to collect so many cool baubles only to let them sit and gather dust.
Other recent departures from Yahoo include Bradley Horowitz in February of this year (he departed for Google). This week Yahoo lost Andy Baio (creator of Yahoo property Upcoming, another favorite), Jeff Weiner from the network division, Usama Fayyad from the research and strategic data division, and developer Jeremy Zawodny. They have also bled out employees from social search (Jeff Bonforte), Brickhouse (Salim Ismail) and Yahoo Music (Ian Rodgers).
Is it possible for Yahoo to stem the tide of abandonment, or must they sit back and reap what they have sown over recent months through slip shod business decisions and bad management of Yahoo and its properties? That's anyone's guess, butone thing is certain - the shareholders are restless, the door to Google has been opened, and Yahoo has never been more ripe for the plucking at a bargain basement price by a large company like Google , Microsoft or NewsCorp than this very moment.
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Michael Fidler 
i don’t agree that Yahoo! has let Flickr sit and “gather dust.”
Great post. The lack of integration and experimentation is really surprising. Why acquire if you’re not going to do anything with them?
I have wanted Yahoo to do more with their properties for ages - pull them together, make them work as a unit to draw more people in, etc and I think they missed the boat on that with Flickr, del.icio.us, etc. All they did with it was make it accept the Yahoo ID of the user, hardly innovative.