Is It Too Late for Yahoo?

My friend Mark Bittman just sent me a fascinating profile of Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s new CEO.

She certainly is impressive and clearly very smart.

The real question is, can she save Yahoo.

The very fact that you have to ask that question says a lot about the world of media today.

Mayer’s quest to ‘save Yahoo’ comes on the heels of another ‘giant’ in need of salvation.

Not too ironically, yesterday, Yahoo (of all people) ran a piece entitled “Can Bill Gates Save Microsoft?”

So many former Giants in need of ‘saving’.  What is happening?

We are living in an increasingly attenuating world.

The famous Lincoln/Douglass debates for the US Senate ran for about 7 hours.  Each candidate spoke for more than an hour, followed by responses, cross questions and so on.  The amazing thing is that audiences sat in rapt interest.  We had a longer attention span in those days.  Today, of course, any ‘answer’ during a Presidential ‘debate’ that ran more than 10 seconds would be considered ‘boring’. The kiss of death.

Books used to run hundreds of pages. Today – a good tweet is 140 characters.  Snappy. Funny. But not a lot of in-depth information there.

Videos and TV shows used to run 30 to 90 minutes.  A video on YouTube that is longer than a minute is death.

That’s just how we are.

Still with me?

Companies and technologies now find that the ‘half-life’ of a business or a device is increasingly short.

No sooner do you LP records ran about 90 years before they were replaced by cassette tapes, that ran for about 30 years, until they were replaced by CDs that had a half life of about 10 years that were then replaced by MP3 or iTunes which was then replaced by Pandora which was then replaced by Spotify which was then replaced by Grooveshark… so far, at least.

All of which brings us to Yahoo.

Not so long ago, Yahoo was the very cutting edge of the online world.

Everyone had a Yahoo email account.

Yahoo was hip. It was edgy. I remember when they put up their giant ‘motel’ like sign on Houston Street in Soho.  Cool.  They obviously had money to burn.

Now, like AOL, Yahoo is an ‘old’ business really in search of a purpose.

What is Yahoo for?

What does it do?

I dunno.

I know what Amazon does. I know what Google does.  I know what YouTube does (how long any of these will last is anyone’s guess). I know what Facebook ‘does’.

But what is Yahoo for?

Search me.

But this is what, it would seem, Ms. Mayer has been hired to do: figure out what Yahoo could be.

It’s a strange kind of business reversal.

Mostly, you take a business that does something – like make cookies or hamburgers or furniture- and you try to figure out how to expand your sales and make it into a big business.

Here, you have a big business that is searching for something to sell – some reason to exist.

The core of this problem probably has less to do with Yahoo, per se, but more to do with the vapid nature of most of what passes for a ‘business’ in the online world.

Most of the stuff online is free for a reason – it isn’t worth much.

Copyright Michael Rosenblum 2013