If I were going to write a “business bestseller” I would write about the cultures at Microsoft, Google and Yahoo and how those cultures are affecting (positively or negatively) their relative performance in the market. This NY Times piece (reg req’d), citing sources, argues Yahoo’s culture is now hampering its efforts.
I’ve long said that I think Yahoo! should by WordPress or, better, Six Apart to replace 360, which is weak in my view. Neither of these blogging platforms is a social network per se but have obvious social features that could be enhanced. Yahoo! has integrated strong social dimensions now across many of its properties and will continue to do so.
But there’s a center missing and that’s what I think a WordPress or Six Apart could provide. Alternatively or in addition MyYahoo could become that missing center with social networking features. I’m told there’s an update coming. I hope that Yahoo! does more with it.
October 11, 2006 at 7:33 pm |
I agree with the observation regarding a company’s culture as an asset or a liability. One has only to look at the culture conflicts that arise in mergers to see the impact of this often overlooked aspect. The hubris at AOL essentially negated any of the powerful benefits that would have been realized in their merger with TW. As consolidation continues, failure to deal with managing culture and change is likely to result in similar fates for others.
October 12, 2006 at 4:29 am |
I disagree about being able to say whether a culture is a liability or asset. The term is basically meaningless. When things are going well, you can toast to “The Culture”. When hard times come along, it’s because “The Culture” is bad…
I think a better correlation is company size. Google is 8k people, Yahoo is something like 13k? Microsoft is 70k. When Google gets to 15k, it’s culture will be the same as Yahoo’s is today.
In other words, Google’s culture looks like every other Silicon Valley company, more or less. (C.f. Sun, SGI, Yahoo, Netscape, Salesforce…) Consider what percent of Google employees worked at those companies previously.
On beating Yahoo to MySpace, perhaps Google’s executives were a bit more ballsy or insouciant about copyright issues than Yahoo’s, or perhaps they just have more money, so the MySpace acquisition was easier for them.
How would Yahoo’s culture looked if they had fixed their search and search ads 1 year ago? Pretty good, I think… but as the article points out, while Google is going into new channels, Yahoo is stuck fixing it’s old one.
That seems to mostly be a function of execution – perhaps Yahoo’s culture never could deal with Overture, but I think it’s historical choices Yahoo made, not a culture thing…
October 12, 2006 at 8:51 am |
You may well be right that size is the driver or a very significant, operative variable. But I do believe that “culture” is a real factor in how businesses perform.