Picking on Yahoo

It seems in fashion to criticize Yahoo these days. They almost look like the poor little guy in class that all others pick on. Not entirely fair I think; although they need to get their act together on lot's of things, there's also a lot of great things happening at Yahoo - both internationally as well as locally.

On the one hand some things are really going wrong - the stock price is in decline, the new search ad-system panama was delayed and some peanut butter loving top managers in the company felt Yahoo needed a change.

On the other hand there are great things happening - Yahoo answers is a great success, silently following the growth pattern of PR baby Youtube. I also think Yahoo is busy with a smart acquisition strategy - buying key properties/technologies early in their development but picking out the right ones like Flickr, delicious etc. And Panama has now rolled in the US and will hit other markets really soon.

More locally here in the Netherlands Yahoo had two separate units (kelkoo and YSM) working pretty much apart and YSM was losing quite some of the big deals with publishers - which led to disappointing results for the advertisers on their network (mainly in volume). But 2007 must become a nice year; panama will roll in the Netherlands in the 1st half of the year, the Kelkoo and YSM teams are now combined under a new manager and Yahoo is starting to role new products into the Dutch market; like Yahoo Cars which just launched or the upcoming NL version of Yahoo answers.