Some milestones of Yahoo!:
2004:
Yahoo! upgrades the email account capacity from 4MB to 1GB to compete with Google.
Yahoo! introduces better AJAX interface to email
Yahoo! launches its own search engine technology.
Yahoo! announces it will practice paid inclusion for its search service.
Yahoo! launches beta version of its video search engine.
2005:
Yahoo! announces interoperability with MS Messenger and Yahoo Messenger.
Yahoo! launches Yahoo! Music
Yahoo! launches blogging and social networking service Yahoo!360
Yahoo! acquires photo sharing service Flickr
Yahoo! acquires widget engine Konfabulator
Yahoo! acquires del.icio.us.
2007:
Yahoo! releases new version of Yahoo!Mail allowing messages to mobile phones
Yahoo! Mail provides unlimited storage.
2008:
Microsoft offers to buy Yahoo! Yahoo rejects offer
Yahoo in Talks with News Corporation and Google on possible mergers.
Yesterday:
Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang says company is ready for sale!
So where did yahoo go wrong in all these years?
1. Biting More than Yahoo! can Chew
Yahoo! announced a large number of services in 2004/2005. New interfaces to its email, new search technology, new acquisitions, new social networking, etc. All of these services added up to a lot of development work for Yahoo, which it could not handle. This resulted in sacrificing quality for quantity. Google, on the other hand grew slowly, perfecting each new service gradually over time (even with betas extending to years).
2. If you break for lunch, you are lunch.
The quote by Jerry Yang summarizes Yahoo!'s state today, ironically. Yahoo! had underestimated the competition. Yahoo was forced to upgrade both its email and search service once Google came along with alternate better services. The company was slow in developing new technologies, probably because of trying to do too many things at the same time.
3. Forgetting the Customer
Many of Yahoo! services were not designed for ease of use, or did they keep customer usability needs in mind. in 2004, Yahoo! attempted to gain more revenues at the expense of customer dissatisfaction by placing paid listings as the top search results.
The Yahoo! Maps did not tolerate misspelling of street names, town names etc, to work correctly. The Yahoo landing page was quite cluttered with too many links and services. All of these and others served to alienate the users, and forcing users to find better competing services.
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Saturday, October 4, 2008
Generational Differences in the Workplace
“Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it” - George Orwell
Any organization today cannot function effectively without managers understanding their employees and vice versa. Motivational factors vary from employee to employee. What are employees looking for at work? What kind of values do they have? What modes of communications do they prefer? All these are interesting issues to be investigated to get the most out of a person (or employee).
A number of approaches to understanding workers have been investigated and used historically. Some involve analyzing workers by birth-sign, graphology, birth order, psychological tests etc. Ranging from science to pseudoscience. They have provided varying degrees of success. It is surprising how many organizations still follow some of these methods which have never been proven scientifically.
However one very effective way of understanding employees in the context of the American workplace is to look at the age of an employee and understand the influences of the environment in which he grew up. The workers of each generation faced unique challenges, grew up in various economical climates, family systems, cultures etc. All of these help shape the worker in his future life.
There has been a lot of research on this topic. Various names have been coined for people of each generation. Here is a generally accepted list of generations used in America.
Traditionalists born 1922 - 1943
Baby Boomers born 1946-1964
Generation X born 1964- 1979
Cold Generation Y born 1981 - 1984
Millennials born 1980 - 2000
Each generation of people have interesting unique characteristics. Understanding the characteristics of each generation of workers helps the manager work more effectively with them. They grew up in different family structures. Attitudes towards money, authority, institutions, personal beliefs were different. All of these and many more factors shape the person. The views, expectations of their job, of their world is hence vastly different. What are the unique issues with each generation? What are their expectations from a job? What motivates them ?
The following series of posts attempts to answer those questions. Studying the characteristics of each generation goes a long way at resolving and avoiding conflicts, getting the best out of your people, managers and workers alike.
Any organization today cannot function effectively without managers understanding their employees and vice versa. Motivational factors vary from employee to employee. What are employees looking for at work? What kind of values do they have? What modes of communications do they prefer? All these are interesting issues to be investigated to get the most out of a person (or employee).
A number of approaches to understanding workers have been investigated and used historically. Some involve analyzing workers by birth-sign, graphology, birth order, psychological tests etc. Ranging from science to pseudoscience. They have provided varying degrees of success. It is surprising how many organizations still follow some of these methods which have never been proven scientifically.
However one very effective way of understanding employees in the context of the American workplace is to look at the age of an employee and understand the influences of the environment in which he grew up. The workers of each generation faced unique challenges, grew up in various economical climates, family systems, cultures etc. All of these help shape the worker in his future life.
There has been a lot of research on this topic. Various names have been coined for people of each generation. Here is a generally accepted list of generations used in America.
Traditionalists born 1922 - 1943
Baby Boomers born 1946-1964
Generation X born 1964- 1979
Cold Generation Y born 1981 - 1984
Millennials born 1980 - 2000
Each generation of people have interesting unique characteristics. Understanding the characteristics of each generation of workers helps the manager work more effectively with them. They grew up in different family structures. Attitudes towards money, authority, institutions, personal beliefs were different. All of these and many more factors shape the person. The views, expectations of their job, of their world is hence vastly different. What are the unique issues with each generation? What are their expectations from a job? What motivates them ?
The following series of posts attempts to answer those questions. Studying the characteristics of each generation goes a long way at resolving and avoiding conflicts, getting the best out of your people, managers and workers alike.
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