Open note to Sony CEO Howard Stringer: Yang’s gone, buy Yahoo!
[Cross-posted with the iMedia Connection blogs.]
It’s odd when the late-night media cycle infects and affects my dreams, but I slept poorly after the net burst out with the news that Jerry Yang is at last saying toodle-oo to the CEO slot at Yahoo! (see the New York Times piece if you missed this.)
Waking up, I wondered who would line up to buy Yahoo. That seems to be the only scene left in this drama, with Microsoft having tried to rush in to marry the unwilling bride and later rebuff her when she changed her mind. While the matchmakers in Redmond might merely be playing coy, all rumors have it that Mr. Ballmer has genuninely moved on.
Yahoo shareholder and board member Carl Icahn (whom the media refer to as “activist investor Carl Icahn” as if the first two words were his Homeric epithet like “the grey-eyed Athena”) will want to mend fences with Microsoft or look for another like buyer– a portal with search, email, IM and content. That’s an audience scale play in an era when scale is eroding quarter after quarter.
Microsoft is the wrong buyer for Yahoo. Sony Corporation is the right one.
Sony has massive consumer electronics, a movie studio, immense television production, PlayStation and gaming, but no owned-and-operated TV distribution. It’s the only big media company that doesn’t have easy in-the-house distribution. Fox has Fox, lots of cable and everything else in the News Corp empire. Disney has ABC and Family Chanel. Universal has NBC, Bravo, USA, Sci-Fi and more. Paramount had CBS and still has a close relationship with it. Warner Brothers has, well, The CW.
Given the fragmentation and spread of the TV audience (I’ve written about this before), Sony could entirely bypass TV, keep its non-affiliated and powerful TV production platform, and also use Yahoo as an alternative ad-supported distribution platform with existing online community.
And imagine adding this power to Sony’s consumer electronics and gaming empires. A Bravia TV might come embedded with Yahoo’s Flickr; PlayStation games arrive pre-equipped with Yahoo Instant Messenger; the Blu-Ray player in PlayStation could have an easy link to Yahoo’s entertainment pages to encourage more purchase and rental… particularly of Sony TV shows and movies.
In the Terry Semel years, Yahoo wanted to compete with the studios and failed. The stock price dwindled (yesterday it was at a Filene’s Basement low of $10.63). Yahoo couldn’t spend the money on the kind of content that the studios make, and so it failed. Yang stepped in to reduce costs (watching the trail of tears of long-time Yahoo employees has been sad for a while) and miss the Microsoft bus.
But Yahoo doesn’t have to be absorbed into a similar portal and doesn’t have to die on the vine. It could be the glue that binds the different parts of Sony together in new and exciting ways.
Sir Howard, are you listening?
One Response to “Open note to Sony CEO Howard Stringer: Yang’s gone, buy Yahoo!”
1 Cris Cohen 18 November 2008 @ 7:40 am
In a sign of how things are going at Yahoo, I’m betting his email to employees didn’t make it past the Yahoo spam filter and now sits in everyone’s junk mail folder along with ads for hair restoration creams.
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