Yahoo Facing A Crossroads

For a weekend, Yahoo sure has been busy. The thing everyone needs to pay attention to is a memo by Yahoo Senior VP Brad Garlinghouse, one that lays out what the rest of the world is complaining about Yahoo, its flaws and mistakes, and demands a new direction before things sort of fall apart. One mistake he focuses on is Yahoo's redundancies (Flickr/Photos, Del.icio.us/MyWeb, Music/Musicmatch, Messenger plugins/Widgets), several products doing the same thing. While there is nothing wrong with taking more than one shot at a particular problem, Yahoo is showing a crisis of confidence, unable to believe in anything and put their support behind some great products. Instead, they compete with themself, and don't win anything because their customers have no idea in what direction they are heading. John Battelle says that Yahoo's COO has asked Garlinghouse to head a group looking into these issues. Arrington says it may be more of a power move by Garlinghouse, to grab credit if already proposed changes are a success, and at the very least, either Brad or Terry Semel will have to go. Dave Winer goes the other way. Yahoo bought Bix, a social contest service, and GigaOm reported that It turns out that Comments Tag: Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Yahoo! My Web | Furl Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog.