A blog by Oleg Shilovitsky
Information & Comments about Engineering and Manufacturing Software

Yahoo! has some PLM problems… Really?

Yahoo! has some PLM problems… Really?
Oleg
Oleg
24 July, 2012 | 2 min for reading

I’m not using much Yahoo! products these days. Actually, I do. When I need to find some graphic for my blog, I use Flickr and filter results for Creative Common license I can reuse. Yahoo! made quite many splashes last week with the announcement of their new CEO, Xoogler, Marissa Mayer.

I thought the event itself wasn’t much related to PLM. However, the follow writeup made by Steve Arnold, one of favorite Google researchers – Simplicity or Just Simple: Pundits Give Advice to Yahooliganette. The article itself worth reading. Mark it for your next weekend. The following two passages caught my attention.

First passage is related to the fact Mayer is coming from product-development companies and has a development background.

By selecting Mayer over interim CEO Ross Levinsohn, Yahoo could be tipping its hand as to what users can expect. Levinsohn’s background is in content, such as Yahoo News and related offerings such as Yahoo Voices (formerly Associated Content, a publishing platform that’s been criticized as a low-quality “content farm.”) Mayer, meanwhile, comes from a product-development background. In her 13 years at Google she helped create the look of a number of services, from Gmail to Google Maps.

Another one is even more interesting. It describes “fundamental Yahoo! problem related to products”:

“Yahoo!’s fundamental problem is that it has too many disparate products with no clear unifying thread that ties them all together,”analyst Shar VanBoskirk of Forrester Research wrote on the company’s blog this week. VanBoskirk, who has followed Yahoo closely, said Mayer must be open to killing the company’s lesser products as she seeks to move things in the right direction.

What is my conclusion? Yahoo! product problems sound very PLMish. I’d encourage PLM companies try to optimize Yahoo! portfolio using PLM tools. It can be an interesting challenge for PLM sales managers and top execs. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
15 March, 2012

3D printing is an important and cool trend these days. For those who are not in the business of 3D...

31 January, 2014

PLM companies are switching to the cloud. Software vendors are taking different paths and technical strategies – IaaS, PaaS, private...

28 February, 2018

PDM (or PLM) was born as idea of centralization of data and processes under single roof (actually database).  Back 30-40...

2 November, 2011

I want to talk about Bill of Material and integration today. The reason why I’m coming to this topic is...

18 September, 2019

Last year, I asked if the Salesforce platform can accelerate cloud PLM. if you missed my article navigate your browser...

20 November, 2009

How many times you’ve been in the situation when you need to explain what PLM is doing to the people...

6 August, 2010

I had a chance to read “Sent from my iPad”  on VEKTORRM last week. Dave Angelotti discussed an option to...

6 July, 2014

Cloud storage is changing fast these days. From relatively small portion of our life limited mostly by online email, cloud...

19 March, 2022

Old habits die hard. Although technology has made leaps and bounds in recent years, many manufacturing companies are still using...

Blogroll

To the top