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
