Kara Swisher has a very nice account of Yahoo’s “Revival Meeting” for top execs, featuring an inspirational talk from Steve Jobs.
Kara (and Steve) are right: Yahoo! has a lot of amazing assets, but what it’s missing is a unique vision. Kara says that Jobs says it’s all about execution, but I don’t think that’s true. What made Apple stand out was Steve’s uncompromising vision, which often runs counter to prevailing wisdom, but yields “insanely great” new products.
I contrast that with Yahoo’s mission statement, “to connect people to their passions, their communities and the world’s knowledge.” I was talking with a senior Yahoo! exec a few months ago and he was surprised that I thought this sounded like a pale echo of Google’s “access to all the world’s information.” Now, I don’t know when Yahoo! articulated this mission statement, but I’ll bet that it’s far less a driver of Yahoo!s strategy than Google’s mission is for its employees.
Yahoo! is a great company, but I don’t think they embrace their greatness, or even know what it is. Steve Jobs knows what matters to him. Larry and Sergey and Eric know what matters to them. I don’t get the same feeling of innate conviction that I get from Apple and Google, where the company is a reflection of who its leaders are, what they value, and how they think.
Now, I’m not saying that’s it’s an easy task to build a huge company that stays true to the vision of its founders. There are very few companies that can really pull that off. Yahoo! obviously started that way, with David and Jerry, but early on, Yahoo! turned itself over to professional managers who built the huge company that exists today — no mean feat — but who were doubtless motivated by financial concerns more than vision, except as an after-the-fact management exercise. Now that Jerry is back at the helm, he needs to dig deep into himself, and articulate what he really believes in.
Then, the challenge is to get the rest of his company to believe in it as well.
That’s a particularly hard challenge when the company’s chief sources of revenue are not necessarily aligned with its creative vision. Google and Apple are in that fortunate spot where their business (the sources of their revenue) and their vision are aligned. Yahoo! is pulled between an older display ad-model that is fundamentally hostile to their users, and the vision of user empowerment.
I sympathize. I struggle with some of the same issues at O’Reilly. Our vision of “changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators” would suggest that all of our content ought to be made as free as possible, yet our business model (e.g. selling books) requires us to restrict access. We are always walking a tightrope between what we give away, and what we restrict. Our goal is always to create more value than we capture, but it’s not as easy as when all the factors are aligned.