kivanmaharaj.com

Like any good army , the general needs to motivate the troops to battle and currently it seems the general of Yahoo seems like a fallen hero that needs some Red Cross assistance.

Mr Yang, I know you can revitalize Yahoo to former glory but you need  to step up to the plate pickup that helmet and gather the troops into action. There is only one way a war is won and that is through battle whether it be small victories or go for goal. The battle has to be fought either way.

What does Jerry have to loose, as either way at the moment he is between a rock and a hard place.

My strategy would be as follows:

1. Cancel the deal with Google

2. Take a look at where Panama is bleeding and start fixing it immediately

3. Take a fresh salesforce to take to the streets and take no prisoners.

4. Look at new emerging markets and strike will the irons hot. Lock in those customers

with tools and technologies that will help grow their business.

5. Create a reseller tier in your sales arm. That will more then compensate for what

Google looks at offering. Pagebook out of Cisco.

These should stabilize revenues and give the market confidence. Then work on building applications to match Google one for one.

I know most people will say that this is harder said then done but if you don’t try you will never know if you really could succeed.

There has been alot of talk recently with respect to Yahoo and why it did’nt take the money and run as well as why it is doing a deal with Google. Well Yahoo seems to feel that a deal with Google would be beneficial to the immediate bottom line. This is of course true but the long term effect will be the demise of Yahoo as a powerhouse on the internet.

I see the deal as a total score for Google as it has the upper hand in negotiations and can set terms for its benefit. I think that Yahoo should go it alone and restructure its engineering teams into smaller workgroups. Each workgroup should get assigned a product either new or existing to work on with a focus on total integration in mind.

The marketing and sales teams should change their current marketing strategy and focus on developing markets where they can gain ad revenue and push their product to the consumer.

What many don’t realise is that in reality Google is not the interent and most of the world does not use Google. The US market is the largest market for Google both in terms of revenue as well as search. That leaves the rest of the planet open to target.

A good example is Baidu.com which is king in China. Why you may ask ? Well they localise their product designed around consumer in that region. This should form a core part of the sales and marketing strategy. In essence, they should take it back to people. People actually decide who is king on the net. Create brand awareness and encourage developers to build on the Yahoo platform. Incentives are a great way to entice those developers.

In any business money talks and user expierence helps grow that revenue, so do sampling from the developing world and see what they like, what they want to see and how Yahoo can give it to them.

Like a good politician go to the masses and woo them. Take a page out of Obama’s workbook to see how it is done. Perception is 99% the battle won.

With social networks being all the craze lately in our web 2.0 boom or bubble depending on which side of the fence you stand one has to wonder what plans the top social networks have to bring their revenue in line with user growth as there is only so much VC money out there that anyone of those guys can get.

In the next 24 months we should see alot of cleanup happening on the web as companies either die or consolidate their efforts to generate revenue and look at either becoming profitable or breaking even , especially VC backed companies as the VC crowd don’t do 10 or 20 year plans.

Google Adsense is definitely not a business model, as that will not generate the revenue you need to keep pace with high growth.

Alot of companies will need to seriously go to the drawing board and come up with some really clever ways to make their apps profitable. I think it will really be hard for the feature apps that only focus on one thing.

Seeing that I am in startup stealth mode I will as well need to be thinking around the same plan for generating constant revenue.

I read an interesting article on how to use stumbleupon as a marketing tool to drive traffic to ones site.

 Have a read, maybe it could help you with your new startup to become a StumbleUpon SuperStar

It would seem that Microsoft is sticking to their guns with their bid and refusing to raise the offer anywhere close to what Yahoo is looking towards. If we look at Microsoft’s share price ,it has actually taken a dip which realistically brings the offer from 44 to 41 billion dollars. We know of couse that Jerry Yang does not want to sell out to Microsoft, as he definitely has an emotional attachment to the company he co-created. It is like giving your kid up for adoption and while you have visitation rights you cannot take the kid home. The harsh reality here is that the Yahoo has many parents also known as shareholders who need to see some sort of long term positive turn around strategy plan coming from the Yahoo board. Their only other option would be to take Microsoft’s offer and call it a day.

Obviously we all know that Yahoo is courting many other companies like News Corp to assist it ,but that is not a long term plan just a save me Microsoft one. Short term great , but in the long term this could be the downfall of Yahoo anyway.

Bill Gates has stated he will not be looking to raise the bid any further, which I think means if you don’t take this offer now there will be no other. The other plan would be for Microsoft to aquire shares slowly and then make an offer for the outstanding share capital. But what I do know is Microsoft will never be able to organically grow their online business as they are already so far behind that no amount of money could change that. They need a Yahoo type of company to bring them into the game and help them with the growth part of the business they lack.

So what are the alternatives hsould they strick out with Yahoo,

1. Aquire more small high growth companies that  could boost thier presence

2. Organically grow their online business by competing head on with Google ,Yahoo and every man and his dog

3. Accept defeat and see where the road thakes them (Obviously not Microsoft’s style)

4. Focus on their core business and forget about the Interent (When hell freezes over)

5. Buyout Facebook for $15 billion and turn it into a web platform

It is difficult to say but I would go with number 1 or 5 as options to not getting Yahoo as a division in your company. 

With the growth in the web advertising space as well as video space it makes perfect sense to now go after the most used consumer technology in the world - mobile phones.

There are a number of companies starting to look into this market including Google. This will be a growing in the near future and first to market will either get aquired or become the new advertising kings.

The big question will be how effectively this will done as with the web keywords work well to determine what a person is looking for. With mobile phones this is a whole other story unless a user is browsing the web via a mbile phone.

Another pressing question is will people want to be bombarded with more advertising. Currently it is nearly everywhere we look, except toilet paper. Maybe that is an idea. Free toilet paper if you are willing to check out the advertising on the roll.

Anyway back to mobile. If any one company can effectively master that platform there will be untold riches at the end of the rainbow.

I will be monitoring this one as it is the way of the future.