The 'Peanut Butter Manifesto'



An internal document by Brad Garlinghouse, a Yahoo senior vice president, says Yahoo is spreading its resources too thinly, like peanut butter on a slice of bread.



My guess is that given Yahoo!'s current situation, CEO Terry Semel and SVP Brad Garlinghouse cannot coexist at the company. The WSJ also reported that COO Dan Rosensweig has put Garlinghouse in charge of a working group to review how the points in the memo can be put into action. That's not exactly a vote of confidence in Semel's ability to lead the company.



The memo is a fascinating read, especially as Fred Wilson puts it, "if you do business with Yahoo!, work for them, own their stock, or care about competition at the top of the Internet pyramid."

We end up with competing (or redundant) initiatives and synergistic opportunities living in the different silos of our company.



• YME vs. Musicmatch

• Flickr vs. Photos

• YMG video vs. Search video

• Deli.cio.us vs. myweb

• Messenger and plug-ins vs. Sidebar and widgets

• Social media vs. 360 and Groups

• Front page vs. YMG

• Global strategy from BU’vs. Global strategy from Int’l



Kill the redundancies. Align a set of new BU's so that they are not competing against each other. Search focuses on search. Social media aligns with community and communications. No competing owners for Video, Photos, etc. And Front Page becomes Switzerland. This will be a delicate exercise -- decentralization can create inefficiencies, but I believe we can find the right balance.

There is a ton of conversation/writing out there in the blogosphere about it as well. Here are a few that you might want to check out:



WSJ (original publisher), John Battelle, Vallywag, GigaOM, TechCrunch, Mathew Ingram, and PaidContent.



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