It's difficult to do and it's difficult to change, but a focus on putting customers first is the most powerful thing an enterprise can do, says Sue Decker, President of Yahoo!. Decker admits that some of the company's strategic hurdles have come from thinking of their products and their technology as the forefront of the business, rather than a total consideration of the end-user experience.
When Yahoo! was a small company sorting through websites, says President Sue Decker, it was easy to stay close to the customer through the three legs of their business; advertisers, users, and content publishers. But as they began their upward scale to 500 million users, the systems they had in place could not hold. Their size and focus, Decker reflects, blinded them to the needs of their customer for many years.
In the early days of the company, the market was on fire, and global outreach was key. At the turn of the millennium, the company gained strength and began to monetize their web presence. And since 2006, the company has been striving to reorganize and funnel its content around an integrated audience. President of the company Sue Decker unveils Yahoo!'s latest evolution of strategy, organization, and process, and explains how the company's size and scale is both an asset and a detriment to its success.
The advertiser doesn't care what media property they're buying online; they simply want to reach their demographic. Yahoo! President Sue Decker explains how the company did not make the most of its competitive advantage to bring the customer to the right ads and how they were late to measure their advertising's effectiveness. Decker further explains how the company is changing its capabilities today, and improving its speed of delivering advertising optimization.
If you love something, set it free and it will come back to you, says the old adage. But as Sue Decker, President of Yahoo! explains, this sentiment also applies to advertising-driven online real estate. The front page of the popular search engine has always been a popular destination - and a great source of revenue for the company. But Decker explains why Yahoo! has chosen to eschew solid revenue in exchange for allowing that space to be controlled by the interest of its users - and the message that gesture sends to the Yahoo! community.
Microsoft came knocking, but they and Yahoo! could not agree on a price, says Sue Decker, president of the search engine and online community. Decker attributes the incomplete partnership to a difference of vision in the potential value of the company, and says that in its wake, Yahoo! is weighing a number of options for the future.
Yahoo! President Sue Decker explains the search engine's testing of Google tools to help close the gap between user search and moneymaking ad clicks. She explains that the partnership was part of the due diligence necessary to benchmark Yahoo!'s own capability to turn search engine users into those who buy from well-targeted on-site ads.