Carol Bartz, Getting Yahoo!’s house in order

Really interesting post from Carol Bartz, Getting our house in order.

One interesting comment: “Finally, a note about our brand. It’s one of our biggest assets. Mention Yahoo! practically anywhere in the world, and people yodel. But in the past few years, we haven’t been as clear in showing the world what the Yahoo! brand stands for. We’re going to change that. Look for this company’s brand to kick ass again.”

She is right here, Yahoo! has got a good brand name.

However, a tough row to hoe against Google in the branding area. Google just dominates the keyword advertising area and, unfortunately, for Yahoo!, that is where the money is at this time.

One thing didn’t thrill me was: “So today I’m rolling out a new management structure that I believe will make Yahoo! a lot faster on its feet. “ I have just seen these “let me fit things in Power Point-land re-structuring too many times. They rarely help. Sometimes, unfortunately, an organization just needs new people or new people in the right places.

Facebook’s New Terms of Service (TOS) – The Service is Free, So What Do You Expect?

I find the uproar about Facebook’s new terms of service self-righteous, very similar to the concern about search engine’s logging one’s searches. There are several newstories about the Facebook terms of service change and blog postings, including this nice posting from Mike Zimmerman.

What caused the concern? Facebook changed it terms of service to give them more control of the data on the Facebook servers, including after accounts close.

Here is deal. The Facebook service, like Web searching, is free. If you don’t like it, don’t use it. Instead, people want both free service and to have total data privacy.

If you really don’t like what these social media and search services are doing, start a competing Facebook-like service (or a Web searching service) that charges a fee for usage but gives users total data privacy.

Why aren’t there such services now in widespread use? … Cost – Benefit Analysis.

The cost (i.e., subscription fee) exceeds the benefit (i.e., data privacy).

Basically, for most of us our data is not really that valuable at the individual level and is, at most, just mildly embarrassing at times.

At the aggregate level, it can have some value. It fact, by not allowing organizations to leverage this data, we may be hampering benefits for ourselves down the road.

Again, the Facebook service is free, fun, and helpful. If they can make a buck or two from leveraging my interactions, good for them, ‘cause I wouldn’t pay for the service. I am guessing that most of the folks complaining wouldn't either.

The infrastructure needed to run these services is expensive, so the companies need to generate revenue.

As a case in point for the failure in the subscription model, see Classmates.com