Droning, Jargon-Filled Yahoo Conference Call

Yahoo’s Vision-Goes-Here Strategy - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog

"All of the other people who were looking to the year-end conference call for some sort of inspiration — advertisers, partners and especially employees — were left disheartened."

"The call sounded like a committee of actuaries talking about the results of a mid-tier life insurance company."

"He presented a warmed-over cellphone portal that seems oddly retro in an age when the iPhone proves we will have full browsing and connected applications on our mobile devices."

"The stock market today is sending a clear message to Yahoo. If you don’t find a convincing growth story fast, you should sell to someone who can."

Quotes from NYT's Saul Hansell on Yahoo's earnings call yesterday.

Ouch.

Yahoo should consider:

1. Turning Flickr into the next Getty Images (the stock photography business is a $2 billion business) -- the amateurs can (and want to) compete with the Pros.

2. Buying Digg and using it to rank Yahoo news and videos.

3. Buying Techmeme and using it as a model for about 100 different niche news areas.

4. Developing some kind of viable blog search to compete with Google Blog Search and Technorati.

Then again, maybe not. They just may be dead in the water when it comes to search. I mean, that little box that sits up in the upper right hand corner of my browser that directs all my search traffic is set to Google by default and Yahoo is not listed in it. What else is in it? Flickr, wikipedia and dictionary.com. That's it.

So even if Yahoo were to continue to improve in search, would I ever even know it?

Maybe the smart thing to do at this point is to try and sell it to Microsoft as fast as they can while they can at least still get $19 a share, it's a heck of a lot better than $6 a share.