The Cellar - Yahoo - 85% of all problems...

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Yahoo - 85% of all problems...

From Marketwatch of 3 Nov 2008:

Quote:

"Yahoo enjoys an extraordinary market position across nearly every category in which we compete, and Scott has been an important leader in building this success," executive vice president of Yahoo U.S. Hilary Schneider said in a statement.

I watched her speech as she accepted the CEO position in Yahoo!. It was unspectacular. She demonstrated no grasp of the company or its industry. Well, Jerry Yang was apparently getting someone he could control.

Yahoo could have sold off to Microsoft as Compaq did to HP. At $30 per share compared to $13 today. Worse is the talent leaching from Yahoo in all directions:

Quote:

Other Yahoo executives who have departed recently include executive vice president of engineering for search and advertising technology Qi Lu, executive vice president of the network division Jeff Weiner and senior vice president of communications and community Brad Garlinghouse.

That's just about every Yahoo core business. 85% of all problems are directly traceable to which Yahoo?

Yahoo! will continue to disintegrate until either is fixes top management, gets fixed by a hostile takeover, or bankruptcy forces Yahoo! to fix its biggest problem.

Jerry Yang was rumored to have had dinner with Murdoch in hopes that NewsCorp would participate as a White Knight. Instead, after the dinner, Murdoch endorsed the Microsoft bid. Yahoo! is in that much trouble. But then some of Yahoo! updated software was so full of bugs that those old software should have been restored. Just another indication of how bad Yahoo! has been long before the stock market saw it.

I used to have Musicmatch service, which unfortunately sold out to Yahoo. At my annual fee payment time, they charged me 7 times for the service instead of once, and it took days for my bank to straighten it out for me. This was $500 btw, instead of the almost $80 it should have been. Then about 2 months later, they sold out to Rhapsody, which was a huge hassle to migrate my service over. I fucking hate Yahoo.

Quote:

Originally Posted by tw (Post 500574)

Yahoo - 85% of all problems...

Oh that is funny as hell. :D

Quote:

Originally Posted by glatt (Post 500580)

It's one thing for Yahoo to agree with me. What are they going to do about it?

Did I mention more than 84% of all problems are directly traceable to ...

Oh crap - That was too funny!

Quote:

Originally Posted by tw (Post 500759)

It's one thing for Yahoo to agree with me. What are they going to do about it?

Did I mention more than 84% of all problems are directly traceable to ...

C'mon, don't be a pussy, go for 86%. :haha:

Yeah, we know it's a figure of speech, used the same as, 'most of', or 'the majority', and not taken as an exact number.

The History of the Phrase

I just saw this in a Wikipedia article about Dr. W. Edwards Deming:

Quote:

Ford Motor Company was one of the first American corporations to seek help from Deming. In 1981, Ford's sales were falling. Between 1979 and 1982, Ford had incurred $3 billion in losses. Ford's newly appointed Division Quality Manager John A. Manoogian was charged with recruiting Dr. Deming to help jump-start a quality movement at Ford. Deming questioned the company's culture and the way its managers operated. To Ford's surprise, Deming talked not about quality but about management. He told Ford that management actions were responsible for 85% of all problems in developing better cars.

So, now we know where that came from.

Oh good catch!

But in the usual "translated" way: "management actions were responsible for 85% of all problems"

...is similar to, but not exactly...

"85% of all problems are directly traceable to top management"

tw actually talks about it here

More than 84% of all problems are directly traceable to tw.