Diverse interests shouldn't be a problem. The media world is dominated by big conglomerates that handle complicated portfolios without stressing over it - because portfolios don't have to fit together to make a pretty picture. It's fine if all the properties are profitable individually.
So IMO Yahoo's problem isn't that no one knows what the fuck it is, but that it's really a Big Media conglomerate that happens to specialise in the Internet, rather than an Internet search company that happens to do media but isn't really sure why.
Mayer half understood this, but her Google experience didn't give her the background, the experience, or the insight to make it work. She seems to have tackled it as a top-down engineering (mobile!) and people management problem, instead of leaving the various divisions to invent their own best profitability strategies.
I don't know - maybe the board would have done better with a former Viacom exec, or someone with a similar background.
True in a sense. I would frame it that the media world is the internet and there are many channels on it.
Larger organizations have fared quite poorly in this environment, especially in a non specialized space reaching consumers.
Bloomberg is a data & tech company with a fairly specialized clientele for their media. Without viewing there financials I would assume cap iq and the terminal data feed dwarf the media arm.
So my poiny above was that adapting Yahoo finance to serve as a consumerized version of Bloomberg, and cross sell data to finance companies viaban APO would have been helpful.
The sports media and application ecosystem looks like fanduel & sbnatition.
The mail service not sure what to do with maybe keep it in the yahoo ecosystem on main.
So IMO Yahoo's problem isn't that no one knows what the fuck it is, but that it's really a Big Media conglomerate that happens to specialise in the Internet, rather than an Internet search company that happens to do media but isn't really sure why.
Mayer half understood this, but her Google experience didn't give her the background, the experience, or the insight to make it work. She seems to have tackled it as a top-down engineering (mobile!) and people management problem, instead of leaving the various divisions to invent their own best profitability strategies.
I don't know - maybe the board would have done better with a former Viacom exec, or someone with a similar background.