In what could be another blow in Yahoo’s fate, Yahoo EVP Jeff Weiner expectedly bolted out from the Yahoo camp due to personal reasons as explained by Yahoo President Sue Decker in email (via Techcrunch) to Weiner’s team.
I wouldn’t question why instead of CEO Jerry Yang, it was Ms. Decker who was addressing the matters to Weiner’s team. I agree with Arrington, Jerry Yang already has his hands full with so many issues to mind some corporate domestics issues such as the resignation of an EVP.
Anyway, what caught my attention from Ms. Decker’s email to the Yahoo employees who have been under Weiner was the way she puts what Yahoo’s Network Division has achieved so far in being the web’s leading starting point.
In addition to acknowledging Jeff, I want to recognize all of you for the unbelievable commitment and energy that you have demonstrated over the last several months as we continue to fulfill our strategic objective to be the leading starting point on the Web. This hard work translates into our numbers. According to the just-released May ComScore metrics, Yahoo! continues to have the most engaged audience in the US with 37 billion total minutes in time spent, and is the most visited site in the US with 3.7 billion visits and an average of 26 visits per user. Yahoo!’s starting points each maintained the #1 (Homepage, My Yahoo!, Mail) or #2 (Search) positions in their categories, and our key content properties (Yahoo! News, Sports Finance and Entertainment) are each #1 in their categories.
And then she went further in identifying key products which Yahoo as recently launched including Search Monkey, SearchScan, Flickr video, Messenger 9.0 among many other things. Finally she hinted on other Yahoo products that is about to be unveiled in the coming days all pointing to Open Social and other Social initiatives.
Clearly we could ascertain from the email that Yahoo aside from being troubled by take-over threats, criticisms on the Google deal and an uncertain future, still Yahoo continues to spread out its strategies to many products and services instead of focusing on each of them at a time. Richard MacManus of RWW hit the point when he wrote – ” that Yahoo! should prune their Everything list and try to leverage their core content properties more smartly.” and I think, that it is the smartest thing to do for Yahoo to get out of the troubled state that it is in right now.
