A memo from Yahoo President Susan Decker to “Yahoos” has turned up on the Internet. It addresses the Yahoo-Google deal, which officially fell through today, and tries to keep an optimistic demeanor as the company goes forward. PaidContent offers a peak at the memo:
While this turn of events is regrettable, it’s important for all Yahoos to recognize that our agreement with Google was just one of many efforts that we have underway to accelerate our strategy. While the implementation of the services agreement with Google would have enabled Yahoo! to accelerate its investments in its top business priorities through an infusion of additional operating cash flow, this deal was incremental to Yahoo!’s product roadmap and does not change Yahoo!’s commitment to innovation and growth in search. The fundamental building blocks of a stronger Yahoo! in both sponsored and algorithmic search were put in place independent of the agreement.
Specifically, there is no doubt that we are improving monetization and driving query growth. Yahoo! continually optimizes its algorithmic and sponsored search, and we have, in 2008 alone, developed and launched hundreds of improvements all designed to enhance search quality and deliver a more relevant search experience to the company’s users, including index expansions and updates, ranking models, and performance tuning. All of these features are designed to improve search quality and deliver a more relevant search experience to our users. Not surprisingly, we are seeing results, with the company benefitting [sic] from strong RPS gains, as discussed in our Q3 earnings call. Further, we are adding search and contextual ad functionalities on a regular basis. Most recently, we enhanced our geo-targeting capabilities to help advertisers better target their ads with powerful country, city and zip-code targeting and improved reporting.
I don’t know how many Yahoos are left to get this message. They seem to be getting rid of them left and right. PaidContent calls her callous. A reader calls her shameless. Nicholas Carlson at Valleywag notes, “While Yahoo profits dropped 12 percent in 2007, Yahoo president Sue Decker’s annual bonus got a 29 percent bump, from $850,000 to $1.1 million.”
Still, there is no question that Yahoo is making some efforts to better its services. The opening up and social aspects tend to give them a slightly fresher approach. And Yahoo’s still reaching out to form other partnerships. Yesterday they partnered with….Delver?
Ok, it’s obvious that the loss of this Google deal was a huge loss for Yahoo, which is why they were so eager to keep battling for it when Google just decided to throw in the towel. Yahoo’s optimism might be secretly dwindling, but they may still have some more tricks up their sleeve.
