Bob Martens

Sriram Krishnan has some unsolicited advice advice for Marissa Mayer.

I agree with much of what he wrote, but I think the main thing that Yahoo! needs (now I’ll just type Yahoo) is some excitement and some direction. Who really cares about Yahoo right now? When the most exciting thing that has happened for Yahoo is the hiring of another CEO, you know you are in trouble.

Flickr might be a good place to start, but I think #9 on the above list is my favorite:

Institute a policy that Yahoo will use off-the-shelf/popular open source tools and technologies whenever possible. When those don’t meet Yahoo’s needs, teams will fork them and contribute back changes. No more pet projects to reinvent what everyone else in the open source world has already built. Fire anyone who uses the words ‘Yahoo scale’ to debate this with you.

This is going to open up some engineering talent to work on products, which is where Yahoo needs to really work. It also opens up candidates to work for the company because there are many people with experience using those technologies.

Is it going to happen? Who knows. The board will need to buy into whatever Ms. Mayer is bringing to the table, so there will be push-back on almost every turn …

… but for Yahoo’s sake I hope that they do.

The exclamation mark isn’t there for emphasis.

As reported all over the internet yesterday, long-time Google employee and VP Marissa Mayer has moved over to Yahoo! as their CEO (hat-tip to The Verge).

I hold out hope that maybe she can turn that place around and provide a credible competitor to Google in many ways. She is, by far, the best candidate that Yahoo! has been able to grab and I eagerly wait to see what changes she might bring to the company.