There are two big questions that yahoo faces. What the fuck do they want to be as a company? And what do they intend to do with the engineers they have right now?
They haven't come up with an answer to the first question so far as I can tell, which is a bigger problem than anything else.
For the second question they are faced with a lot of problems. If they want to try to retain as much talent as possible they're going about it the wrong way. If they want to instill discipline and transition down to a smaller more mediocre more "enterprisey" company that pumps out crappy line-of-business apps then they're doing a damned fine job so far.
If I were forced to try to turn yahoo around I'd start by identifying the major projects that yahoo should execute on and then I'd either fire almost everyone and start from scratch or I'd work by replacing the company from the inside out by growing a "bubble" that was a new division built with new rules with new management that hired both from outside the company and from within yahoo and was highly results oriented and, at least initially, worked on fast iteration projects that are easier to judge success on.
A couple good candidates for projects that could serve to help re-energize the company are flickr, yahoo stores, and yahoo hosting services. Revolutionize those, iteratively, make them competitive, and you could go a long way toward revitilizing the company and providing projects that people actually want to work on.
I think you are right on this point: they need to figure out the strategy and direction of the company, and then blast it out everywhere (isn't this the CEO's job)? Define the vision, communicate it, then arrange your resources to aggressively pursue it.
They haven't come up with an answer to the first question so far as I can tell, which is a bigger problem than anything else.
For the second question they are faced with a lot of problems. If they want to try to retain as much talent as possible they're going about it the wrong way. If they want to instill discipline and transition down to a smaller more mediocre more "enterprisey" company that pumps out crappy line-of-business apps then they're doing a damned fine job so far.
If I were forced to try to turn yahoo around I'd start by identifying the major projects that yahoo should execute on and then I'd either fire almost everyone and start from scratch or I'd work by replacing the company from the inside out by growing a "bubble" that was a new division built with new rules with new management that hired both from outside the company and from within yahoo and was highly results oriented and, at least initially, worked on fast iteration projects that are easier to judge success on.
A couple good candidates for projects that could serve to help re-energize the company are flickr, yahoo stores, and yahoo hosting services. Revolutionize those, iteratively, make them competitive, and you could go a long way toward revitilizing the company and providing projects that people actually want to work on.