Yahoo’s New Social Mission
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | May 16, 2007 | Share This
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Today Yahoo announced their new mission statement, “To connect people to their passions, communities, and the world’s knowledge.” As Jeff Wiener of the Yahoo Network Division writes,
“Last year, the executive team at Yahoo! made the decision to re-organize the company with one of the central themes being the evolution of a culture from one largely organized around products, to one that is far more organized around our customers. The goal behind the re-org was to help us rationalize and consolidate duplicative products, create greater focus on key priorities, clarify strategic direction, and ultimately develop an environment where we could accelerate the speed and quality of our decision-making.
…As part of the realignment, we formed the Yahoo! Network Division, which includes the majority of Yahoo!’s consumer-facing products; our Search products; the Media properties; and our Front Doors. So, what’s the rationale behind putting all of these assets under one roof? The answer to that question lies no further than our mission statement: “To connect people to their passions, communities, and the world’s knowledge.”
Wiener goes on to discuss the details of Yahoo’s new Mission. In Sum: Yahoo is most interested in social technologies - behavioral advertising, community learning, user-generated content, etc. They see search as a point of communication between publishers, advertisers and users. Unlike Google’s mission to “organize the world’s information”, Yahoo’s seems to be to organize the world’s communication — as Wiener writes, “communication applications like Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger facilitate the ability for people to exchange knowledge.”
Throughout the post, Wiener rather liberally uses the word “information” in place of more appropriate words like, “entertainment” “recommendations” and “content”. No less, it’s interesting to see Yahoo’s re-org finally underway, shaping into a single department with a single consolidated direction.
Topics: Search: News, Social Media, Yahoo! |
Why are these guys always last to get something out? I am unimpressed with this late breaking mission.