Yahoo plagued by "systematic rot" says Om Malik
Almost every technology and business publication, including Valleywag, has been all Yahoo, all the time. Between the Microsoft merger talks, proxy board battle with Carl Icahn and employees leaving nearly every day, there's been lots of deliciously bad news to report. However, my old boss Om Malik over at GigaOm has been fairly quiet on the issue. One reason why is because a lot of his sources at the company have probably left, which is good for them but bad for a good reporter. Today, however, he weighed in with his analysis.
What hasn’t been discussed is that the company isn’t really facing up to the fact that its layers of management have resulted in a state of masterful inactivity, masked perhaps as a culture of consensus. This starts at the top - from the company’s board and senior management down to VP level where people are prone to organizing and attending twenty meetings before deciding the fate of a project.
Granted, he may be a little petulant that Yahoo wasn't well-represented at the Structure 08 conference he threw this week — even after he gave the company's open source cloud computing software Hadoop center stage at an earlier after-work presentation GigaOm hosted. He has, however, been covering Yahoo for longer than many other publications working the story have existed, and breaking his relative silence to predict doom for the company will hopefully shake up some of the executives down in Sunnyvale. (Photo by Pete Jelliffe)