Yahoo's Bottomless Bureaucratic Maw; or, a Story of Management Meltdown

Yesterday my former boss's boss at Yahoo was sacked. His sacking â€" the first in a series of lay-offs that will see at least 1,000 others fall to the axe â€" even appeared in a "so it begins" post on Valleywag. My first reaction as a recent former Yahoo was one of schadenfreude, that thinly disguised intellectual version of Nelson Muntz's maniacal "ha ha!" from "The Simpsons." Seems I'd gotten out just at the right time.

Then of course there was the inevitable worry over the fates of my mates. Sure enough, the emails and IMs came trickling in. My former VP's assistant â€" a working mom who had kept our crew liberally supplied with bagels and beef jerky and who had organized many of our little team outings â€" went with him. I got another email this morning-- and another this afternoon-- and they keep coming.

At the same time it was letting people go, the company announced its acquisition of the online video firm, Maven Networks, for $160 million. After years in limbo, the online video space is finally supposed to be going gangbusters, thanks largely to YouTube, a Google property since December of 2006, and Yahoo wants a piece of it. What Yahoo can actually do with it at this late date is anyone's guess. As likely as not, Maven Networks will get shoved into the company's bottomless bureaucratic maw and, once digested, end up another moribund also-ran, like Yahoo 360. Good luck.

Even more bizarre was news of Yahoo's launch Monday of Tech Ticker, a Yahoo Finance news program of video shorts that covers Silicon Valley business. Though the Tech Ticker project started long before Yahoo's current troubles came to light, the idea that Yahoo can compete in the online business news with genuine news players is questionable to say the least.

Let me explain. At Yahoo, I managed, compiled, wrote and edited two blogs. Every single post underwent managerial, marketing, public relations and legal review, each of which did their level best to snip, clip and siphon the life out it. Not only was I forbidden to mention the dreaded G-word, "Google," I couldn't even refer to the number "googol," so paranoid were my gate-keepers. It's hard to see how a company like that can hope to become a credible original news source, especially in its own space.

Over the last year or more, Yahoo's leadership has been busily shunting boxes to and fro on the org. chart, going after penny-ante social networking and media acquisitions like MyBlogLog and Bix and changing the wording of the company's already vague mission statement from "To connect people to their passions, their communities, and the world's knowledge" to the even vaguer and grammatically challenged: "Yahoo! powers and delights our communities of users, advertisers and publishers -- all of us united in creating indispensable experiences, and fueled by trust." (I'm not kidding.)

And while the company's top brass were busy at their off-sites, rearranging the slides in their PowerPoint decks and slapping each other on the back over Yahootinis at the cleverness of their own Big Thinking, their footing in the market was shifting out from under them like the San Andreas Fault during an earthquake.

It doesn't take a genius to know what Yahoo's mission is. It's the same as every media company's since the dawn of advertising: "To sell audiences to advertisers."

But over the last five years distraction after distraction has blinkered the company, causing it to flail in every direction at once except the one in which they needed to go, leaving it stranded like a gimpy jellyfish.

Take for example, Yahoo Publisher Network, Yahoo's answer to Google's Adsense contextual ad network. Here the company had a chance to compete in a $1 billion market that was inline with its core business â€" selling audiences to advertisers â€" in an atmosphere in which online publishers were literally begging for an alternative to Google. More than two and a half years after launch YPN is still in limited beta.

Of course, Yahoo might actually yank its head out â€" or maybe Steve Ballmer will do it for them â€" but the last year or so has been emblematic of how quickly a once agile company can suddenly lose its mojo. And leadership is to blame.