CES: Interview: Jeff Weiner, EVP-Network Division, Yahoo: ‘You’ll See This Stuff In ‘08’
When Marco Boerries and David Filo joined Jerry Yang on the stage of the Las Vegas Hilton Theater to show off new launches and upcoming concepts, the audience at their feet included most of Yahoo’s (NSDQ: YHOO) top management—among them Jeff Weiner, who we last heard from here after he shook up the Yahoo Media Group. Weiner seemed a little taken aback by my comparison of Yang’s presentation with the one Terry Semel gave in 2006, particularly with how many elements of the strategy—for instance, Go, the three-screen approach to connecting—were still in place albeit evolving.
His reply: “We’re trying to simplify the way you’re using your digital universe. I think a major change between then and now is the emphasis on open—opening up and leveraging the platform capabilities the company has been working on for both the mobile widget applications … and then on a going-forward basis bringing to life the kind of applications that you saw in something like Yahoo mail, going forward on the Yahoo home page, in MyYahoo and ultimately in search.”
He took that a step further to the anchor properties like news, finance and sports (all in his portfolio). “You can also imagine, similar to what you saw there, a very relevant application in sports would be something like fantasy. You can imagine the kind of evolution you could see in our fantasy offering, when you start to leverage the platform capabilities we were talking about—connecting people in a relevant way. I thought one of the key points today was the smarter inbox, the smarter news
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Comments (1)
Jan 14, 2008 1:19 PM
It’s been about two years since I left Yahoo, and I was part of the company formerly known as SMG - Search & Marketplace Group. Affectionally, we called it Weiner’s world among the team :)
The “personalization” bit is one that’s been bandied about for years…Yahoo has some amazing patents, technologies, etc, in this area as well.
However, even with that amazing IP, user data, engagement, and hundreds of millions of inboxes…they can’t seem to deliver.
To me, this smacks of the same “rah rah” kind of speech that Jeff, Terry, or another executive from the C level team would deliver every few months when I worked there. Sorry, but the one company in the world that sells out it’s search results is still playing for tomorrow, not next year, and it’s that kind of shot sightedness that’s plagued them for years which is one of their biggest handicaps.