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Yahoo Yawwn! Parody T-Shirts in the Militant Geek Tee Shop - Starting at $15.99

Two recent stories concerning Yahoo have crossed the retired circus monkey desk this week. This first is that Yahoo has apparently keyed on the motivation that will help it unify its efforts against the Google behemoth. Is it a refined focus? A killer acquisition? No - as reported by CNet, it’s the color purple.

Yahoo offers contests for the most dedicated evangelist among its 13,000 global employees, she said during the keynote speech at the Liquid Agency Brand Summit 2007 at the Four Seasons Hotel in Palo Alto, Calif., Tuesday morning. Employees who do things like ask people who don’t work for Yahoo “Do you Yahoo?”, memorize the company’s mission statement and wear Yahoo gear to the office for a day can win trips paid for by the company, she says. Even visitors to Yahoo offices see purple everywhere, from the oversize, purple velvet seats in the lobbies to the purple sprinkler heads in the lawns as the company tries to embed its purple, fun image into people’s consciousness.

While Yahoo’s marketing tries to associate its purple with ‘fun’ most people are more likely to associate it with the bruising its getting from all sides. And not just from major companies. As TechDirt is reporting Yahoo is being sued by its users because its ad platform sucks. As Mike writes out:

Who knew that it was against securities law to make a product that didn’t live up to expectations?

He then (rightly) points out that most class-action lawsuits are really not about helping the ‘class’ represented but more about the lawyers involved. Still, how discouraging must it be to hype up the advertising system as being the Yahoo savior and then have it be sued by its very users?

Rumors of a brewing $50 billion deal appeared in papers like the New York Post, Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times over the weekend. Of course, the retired circus monkeys and I that work for Militant Geek don’t read any of those. We instead heard in a round-about manner from Valleywag.

But why now? One banker quoted in the Post said “They’re getting tired of being left at the altar.” That certainly may be true but both companies are profitable. Both could certainly continue doing what they do for many years to come. If they do merge they take both unsexy, yet functional fiefdoms and carelessly toss them into a thicket of tough questions: will they iron out the operational kinks quick enough to react to nimble competition? What will happen to their two distinctly different search operations? And, most importantly, how soon will the new company kill the Zune?

Yahoo Yawwn! Parody T-Shirts in the Militant Geek Tee Shop - Starting at $15.99

It’s been long enough since we had shared the latest Yahoo blunder that we began to wonder if they had righted the ship. However, today’s news doesn’t disappoint - Yahoo owns HotJobs. HotJobs has positions to fill. And, according to Donna Bogatin, Yahoo has resorted to placing ads on the free Craigslist classified site to fill those spots. Rather embarrassing for a service which declares itself as “the world’s number one Internet brand”.

Ah, Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The struggle for civil rights and the ultimate triumphant of peaceful protest over bigotry is something we can all drink to, geek or not. Given that the assembled team or monkeys and I are still working through our post-Martin malaise here’s the important stuff from last week that just didn’t quite warrant its own post.

• A little company out of California announced a new cellphone, or something.
• Actually, futher examining the iPhone exposes Apple’s business model for what it is: a roach motel where: “customers check in, but they can’t check out”. From Boing Boing, Illustration by Christophe Vorlet
• But if your business model is based on customer lock in how do you keep the word from spreading? Why, bullying bloggers, of course. As Geek & Poke deliciously declare “Someday you’ll have to decide: Do you want freedom of the press or this really cool phone?”
• Just to remind people that things non-Apple related still do happen we thought we’d let you know that Napster bought AOL music. We also thought we’d let you know that an AOL music service with an awesome factor of 0 times anything is still zero.
• The news about Vista just keeps getting better:
  

  if your computer detects erroneous data in its registers, or voltage fluctuations (both of which are typical of PCs whose parts have been manufactured by dozens of companies), it will restart major subsystems, hanging up while it flushes all your data — just in case those errors were part of a hack-attack on the system.

  Meanwhile John Carmack, quasi-famous game developer (Quake, Doom), rocketeer, and quote machine says that Vista leaves him cold:

  Nothing is going to help a new game by going to a new operating system. There were some clear wins going from Windows 95 to Windows XP for games, but there really aren’t any for Vista… They’re really grasping at straws for reasons to upgrade the operating system. I suspect I could run XP for a great many more years without having a problem with it.

• The Pirate Bay, a legion of swiss hackers who thumb their nose at copyright and have become a political party, are looking to buy an Island. They’re raising money for Sealand, a decrypt platform and pseudo sovereign nation six miles off the coast of the U.K. The owners are asking nearly $1 billion for a WWII concrete slab that was largely damaged last June in a fire. They’ve raised $15,000 so far and have started negotiations. Pr0n fiends the world over begin giggling uncontrollably.
• eBay buys StubHub, a ticket reselling site, for $310 million. eBay already had a ticket marketplace but I guess they have aspirations of Yahoo like redundancies.
• Sprint is laying off 5,000 people. Even over a phone the sound of sudden anxiety was as clear as a pin drop.
• MyBlogLog, a five person distributed operation, is sold to Yahoo for $10 million. The founders promise to spend their new windfall on a classier set of pajamas to wear to work.
• Second Life’s client software goes open source. Which might be cool if it was anything other than Second Life. As Valleywag says ‘Unless you’re a sexual deviant, its as boring as hell’.

Say what you will about Google - that they’ve turned evil, lost viewers trust, or gone plane crazy; at least they don’t design like Yahoo. Steve Bryant shares the ugly cluttered results (link has full color and larger size):

Ho-Boy! There have been a lot of high profile reorganization of the corporate org charts lately. Without further ado lets recap the latest in big business musical chairs!

• Yahoo Yawwn! Parody T-Shirts in the Militant Geek Tee Shop - Starting at $15.99

  Yahoo finally got some good news: Google was pulling out of the online answers game, an area where they were directly competing with Yahoo. It was the first victory in the press that Yahoo! has gotten in a long time - their problem lately being perceived as loosers rather than actual financial looses. Before people could get too excited Yahoo! promptly pulled a play from the book of lame and stuffed existing management into each other’s jobs. Bold. Only one real player, Llyod Braun, is moving on to another ship.

• eBay, unlike Yahoo!, knows how to make a shakeup. It axed the entire business development part of its Skype division. People are still wondering what eBay saw in the European VOIP software that warranted a $4 billion price tag. Must not have been the talking heads.
• Next HP is dumping Larry Sonsini, once one of the most powerful lawyers in Silicon Valley. Turns out advising your paranoid clients that tapping phone calls was ok is a bad career move.
• Bram Cohen is gone from BitTorrent, the company he started in his bedroom. The company raised $20 million to pursue deals with major content provides; a business move that is no sure bet. In my mind I like to picture Bram, himself an uber nerd, storming out of the smoke filled board room in righteous disgust. In reality, however, his ouster probably has many more dollar signs written on it.

Yawnn! - Yahoo! Parody T-Shirts in the Militant Geek Tee Shop - Starting at $19.99

Over the weekend it seemed that any pundit with an inkling of ambition was talking about Yahoo’s “Peanut Butter” memo. We at the Militant Geek custom TShirt shop, who are only occasionally ambitious, let it slide until Monday.

Written by a Yahoo Senior V.P., Brad Garlinghouse, the peanut butter memo is the stinging call to arms that we’ve been arguing is long overdue.

I believe we must embrace our problems and challenges and that we must take decisive action. We have the opportunity - in fact the invitation - to send a strong, clear and powerful message to our shareholders and Wall Street, to our advertisers and our partners, to our employees (both current and future), and to our users. They are all begging for a signal that we recognize and understand our problems, and that we are charting a course for fundamental change

Apparently laser-beam time capsules were not enough signal for Brad. But where’s the peanut butter he referred to? Make with the metaphor!

We lack a focused, cohesive vision for our company. We want to do everything and be everything — to everyone. We’ve known this for years, talk about it incessantly, but do nothing to fundamentally address it. We are scared to be left out. We are reactive instead of charting an unwavering course. We are separated into silos that far too frequently don’t talk to each other. And when we do talk, it isn’t to collaborate on a clearly focused strategy, but rather to argue and fight about ownership, strategies and tactics.

Our inclination and proclivity to repeatedly hire leaders from outside the company results in disparate visions of what winning looks like — rather than a leadership team rallying around a single cohesive strategy.

I’ve heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular.

I hate peanut butter. We all should.

Awww, Brad - don’t be a hater!

In other Yahoo! news… they bought some more companies that are kind of like the companies they already have. Big kudos go out to Bix, MyBlogLog, and Kenet Works for being the latest nuts to be smoothed over into that big peanut butter sandwich now known as Yahoo! With leaked internal documents like this who needs critics?

You can read the full memo on Paul Kedrosky’s blog.

We’ve been following the dirt ValleyWag has been releasing on Yahoo with keen interest. As you may remember, we gleefully blogged about Yahoo’s botched laser/pyramid bit a month ago. Then came word that several top Yahoo executives would be in the laser sites of a different sort in short order. That was followed by a cattle call of the usual suspects.

It’s nice to see that Yahoo recognizes the predicament they’ve made for themselves and are willing to shake the rank and file awake with some symbolic firings. But will it be enough to transform a universal ‘also-ran’ into a cover-getter? Even Las Vegas isn’t touching this one. Until they do something noteworthy, however, you can capture their unique position in today’s tech industry with the Militant Geek ‘Yawnn!’ Yahoo parody shirt. They start at $19.99 in the Militant Geek Store.

Let’s suppose you’re a major Internet player with $4 billion dollars lying around. The kids used to think you’re cool. However, after repeatingly failing to buy friendship from AOL, MySpace, and YouTube it is that charismatic jock Google that’s getting all the attention. Facebook won’t even return your calls. What do you do?

Apparently, if you’re Yahoo!, you win the popularity contest by beaming a laser into space - from the top of a rented Mexican pyramid, no less. Let’s run through the Bubble 1.0 checklist for stupid wastes of investor money:

1. Exotic Locale - check
2. Useless Display of Technology - check
3. Clueless Self-Importance - check

But wait! It turns out Yahoo! can’t even get a break with the Mexican government! Mexico has retracted its agreement and the laser of Dr. Evil-like brilliance won’t be going anywhere. Mios Dio! Somebody’s gotta be hitting the tequila pretty hard over this one.