The sources pointed out that the iPad 2 will ship as soon as the end of February in 2011. Apple originally planned to start mass production in January, but because the device’s firmware is currently still in testing, Apple has been postponing the schedule. Since Foxconn’s new plants in Chengdu are still in pilot production, iPad 2 will be mainly supplied by its Shenzhen plants, while the company’s upstream component partners have all been notified of the shipments schedule.

A February launch would be consistent with rumours pegging the iPad revision in the first part of 2011. Other rumoured features include a FaceTime camera, gyroscope, faster processor, thinner form factor, retina display and a USB connector – possibly thinner.

I wouldn’t go back to a Blackberry, but there so pieces of functionality that would be really welcome. I’ve tried to explain my thoughts here:

Typing

I actually have no trouble typing on the iPhone. (I’ve even had races with Blackberry challengers in my office!) However, I think there are some improvements that could be made.

• Custom dictionary: The ability to add/amend words added to the dictionary
• Autotext: I miss the ability to type something on my Blackberry like myemail and it auto converts to david@davidburden.com
• The introduction of software such as Swype to make entry even faster
• Perhaps some shortcuts with a finger gesture – perhaps holding one finger in the bottom left corner and writing a big N across the screen with the other would take you straight to Compose New email

Email

I think this is where many of the quick wins could be found to make the device more Enterprise suitable.

• When composing an email, on a Blackberry it remembers the email account you last used to send to a particular email address. This would be useful.
• Now with iOS4, at least there is now a combined email list. However, I cannot tell which email belongs to which account. Perhaps a colour scheme like this for each email?

• Smaller fonts: Now the new iPhone has better contrast, can we not see an options for smaller fonts? Even on my Blackberry Bold, with worse resolution, I could easily read 6 pt – however I know this would cause an issue with usage if there was no keys or ball. But surely we can go a little smaller?
• Signatures for each email account: Having one signature for all accounts just doesn’t work. I want to set a signature for my corporate email only
• Expansion of the ActiveSync functionality: There needs to be more options here such as Out of Office, Tasks, Notes (which now works only with LDAP accounts). I know you can buy apps to do this, but this should be integrated. Integration with Exchange needs to be improved. If I replied or forwarded an email on my Blackberry, Exchange would know this and show me within my Exchange on my PC. There’s no link like this with the iPhone and Exchange.
• Split emails into days, mark all as read before marker: I would like the emails segregated into day chunks. A click on the bar that separates could mark all as read below?
• Ability to rearrange order of mailboxes: This is small, but I would like the ability to move the list of email account around.
• Option to incorporate SMS into email flow. I like the idea of having all communications in one area. Email, SMS and log of calls.

Here’s my summary of what happened at WWDC and the announcements made today. This is all draft and I’ll add some meat to the bones later:

• 2 million iPads sold since launch = one sold every three seconds
• New iBook app launching today, which also will display PDFs
• 15,000 apps submitted to Apple each week, 95% apps approved within seven days
• Reed Hastings CEO of Netflix announced they’re coming to iPhone in the summer. Wifi and 3G
• Apple have just passed the five billion apps download mark, 70% of revenue goes to the developer – and Apple have just hit the $1billion payout mark
• US Smartphone market share RIM 35%, iPhone 28%, Windows 19%, Android 9%, Other 9%
• Steve Jobs “In 2008 we added 3G and the App Store, in 2009 the 3GS was twice as fast, and we added some other cool features like video… in 2010 we’re going to take the biggest leap since the original iPhone.”

iPhone 4

• 24% thinner than the iPhone 3GS
• Front facing camera
• LED flash
• Noise cancellation mic
• Antenna built into the side panels to improve strength
• Glass front and back to improve scratch resistance
• Stainless steel fro strength
• 326 PPI, 960×640 display, 800:1 contract resolution, 4x better than the 3GS, IPS technology
• Phone powered by the Apple A4 chip
• Battery life 40% more talk time, 3G talk 7 hours, 10 hours of Wifi, 10 hours of video, 40 hours music, 300 hours standby
• Wireless 802.11n
• GPS + Accelerometer
• Now, the iPhone 4 will have a gyroscope for 6 axis motion sensing. A Jenga game demo was very impressive
• A whole new camera system built into iPhone 4, 5 megapixel camera, backside illuminated sensor, 5x digital zoom, LED flash
• Video! 720p at 30fps, HD video, edit on phone
• iMovie for iPhone, fantastic, transitions, timelines, library, geolocation, five themes, export – not free $4.99

iPhone OS 4

• iPhone OS 4 becomes iOS 4
• Multitasking, folders
• Threaded email, integrated inbox
• Adding Bing to the options to search
• Close to selling the 100 millionth iOS (iPad, iPod touches, iPhone) device
• iBooks to the iPhone, same book purchase once and then use on all your devices, iBooks automatically syncs your place, bookmarks and notes
• Oh, and iAds. These are some of the companies advertising: Nissan, Citi, Unilever, AT&T, Chanel, GE, Liberty Mutual, State Farm, Geico, Campbells, Sears, JC Penny, Target, Best Buy, Direct TV, TBS, and Disney
• Oh, and video calling with wifi only in 2010 – called Facetime

When?

• Two colours, black and white
• $199 for 16GB, $299 for 32GB
• If you’re with AT&T and your contract ends anytime in 2010 you can upgrade. You can get it six months early
• The iPhone 4 arrives on June 24th, you can pre-order from June 15th
• Shipping to 5 countries: US, France, Germany, UK, Japan

iPhone HD/4G

As timing suggests, this WWDC should be no exception for a new iPhone to be announced. Everything points to a new model. AT&T have cancelled vacation for staff, have changed their dataplans (effective 7 June), etc – so that’s pretty locked in. I’m wondering if the new phone will go on sale instantly straight after Job’s announcement.

If the rumours are correct, this phone promises to shape up quite nicely:

• Larger, extended life battery. 5.25 watt-hours, which apparently is 17% increase from the iPhone 3GS battery
• Screen resolution a whopping 960×640 which might just look as good as a high-end glossy magazine, and that would be incredible
• Forward facing camera for video iChat. Not sure if this can be used on the cellphone network, it might be constricted to wifi only
• Rear facing camera. I would expect the camera should be fairly high spec if the iPhone has a high quality screen. I think 5 megapixels or above. There will be a high intensity LED flash in there too. Some people are predicting 720p video recording
• Not really new news, but the iPhone will take a MicroSIM
• The new look is sleek. It seems to have a more glass-like back. This is good for signal reception, but maybe less durable. Apple did put a patent in a while back for a ceramic/glass-like material
• I don’t think an iPhone for another US network will be announced at this time

iPhone OS 4.0

This new OS has been finely tuned and will offer many benefits for the newer iPhones such as:

• Multitasking
• The iAd mobile advertising system for developers
• Perhaps Facebook built into the OS or a social networking platform
• A gaming store or network similar to XBox Live or Playstation Network
• Many OS improvements such as integrated Mail and folders
• For AT&T US users, for the first time tethering will be available

iTunes in the cloud

Jobs said this week that Apple are ‘working on this’ – so I doubt the availability will be announced on the 7th. However, I believe at some point Apple will be offering music streaming from iTunes.com and you’ll be able to access your music or other purchased content via any Apple device. Apple recently purchased the streaming site Lala – and then shut it down.

• Multitasking
• The iAd mobile advertising system for developers
• Perhaps Facebook built into the OS or a social networking platform
• A gaming store or network similar to XBox Live or Playstation Network
• Many OS improvements such as integrated Mail and folders
• For AT&T US users, for the first time tethering will be available

Wednesday will undoubtedly see the latest release of Apple’s iPad or iTablet or iSlate or iPaper or iWhatever – due to the the amount of legal trademark action going on right now with Apple, it looks like they’re stumping for iPad. So, what do we know?

- The iPad will be offered 10, 13 or 15” in size. The tablet probably will go on sale between March and the summer and cost anywhere from $800 to $1,000.

- The iPad name is the forerunner of the brand due to the work Apple Legal are pushing at the moment to trademark wrestle it away from Fujitsu. A search in the Canadian trademark database reveals that Apple’s dummy corporation Slate Computing, LLC also applied for a trademark for “iPad” under the categories of handheld mobile digital electronic devices with a broad range of applications.

- Apple will possibly end their exclusive agreement with AT&T in the US, with the iPad being launched on AT&T on 3G and/or Verizon on CDMA.

- Apple are hoping this device will be a competitor to the Kindle. They have been working deals with many publishing houses behind the scenes. The announcement by the New York Times last week that they’ll move into a subscriber model next year, folds into the iPad launch. I always wondered how the battery would be able to last. If Apple bring out a iPad with a OLED screen, and have white writing on black, this should do the trick…

- The iPad will probably run a version of OS that has more hand gestures included, and may include a new iLife package for mobile.

- A new OS for iPhone will be released. This could be OS 4.0 as browser stats in and around the Bay have show devices running this OS. Also, Apple could be pulling away from its arrangement with Google. We could see Apple partner with Microsoft and include Bing Maps on its devices.

- iTunes will be in the cloud. You will not need iTunes installed on your Mac or PC to download content. You’ll be able to download via itunes.com

I called Audi a few days ago. Even though I got through to the wrong department, the employee took ownership and told me she would reach out to the service department and arrange my appointment. She called me back within 15 minutes with the time and date – and who my advisor would be.

I arrived at Audi Stevens Creek this morning. I drove straight to reception, and was met outside by a cheerful, professional guy who somehow knew I was Mr Burden. “Good morning Mr Burden, welcome to Audi Stevens Creek”

He walked around the car with me and then walked me into the showroom. I was introduced and greeted by a technician who took me through what would be happening today. He also told me there were no outstanding details or recalls on the car. (By the way, I have $0 to pay on my service as it is part of my agreement)

I was then walked outside where a shiny new A4 was waiting for me to borrow for the day.

Kudos, Audi Stevens Creek. A great experience.

UPDATE: I’ve just been sent an automated email with a PDF that outlines the service work that was performed. Very impressed.

I called AT&T several times during the same day and got the usual stock responses: restart, take out your battery and wait 30 seconds etc. I don’t presume to be a Blackberry expert, but I have had several Blackberries over six years. It seemed I knew more than the operators and it became very exhausting.

AT&T were stumped. In the end they said it was my IT department’s problem as I was on BES. It was only after three hours with our Desktop Team and a conference call directly with RIM a hardware failure was diagnosed.

AT&T advised me to return the unit to a store for a straight swap and put a note on my account that I was going to do that the same day. OK I thought, I’ll do it on the way home.

I went to my local store and they refused to swap it as it was over four weeks old. OK, you have policies AT&T, but my Blackberry is my lifeline when it comes to work, I bought a brand new Bold from you five weeks ago, you sell the Bold as true business tool, and, by the way, this phone isn’t that inexpensive. The two assistants stood there, leaning on their workstation with their arms folded in a ‘not my problem’ stance. They even refused to look at my account on their PC when I told them a note had been placed on the system.

The store told me to go through their warranty exchange programme. Therefore, I was without my Blackberry over the Christmas season – which is just when I needed it if there was a major incident at work while I was out on vacation.

The AT&T store should have said, sorry Mr Burden, we cannot believe your $500+ unit we bill as the ultimate business tool has failed in five weeks, here’s a new one. No questions asked.

Am I wrong?

This is my eighth Blackberry which seems a bit greedy, and it’s only been six months since I bought the Curve, which is a little strange I admit, but, hey, I’m a glutton for new gadgets and technology.

The feel and usability of the Bold is fantastic. There have been many reviews already done, so I don’t want to replicate. You notice the speed and stability more than anything. There is more internal memory to let your applications run smoothly and load quickly. The screen is fantastic and you can watch video in glorious detail. I slapped in a 8GB card and have some films and television to watch when I’m on the move. The keypad is quiet, solid and responsive.

The improved Blackberry Browser tied with the crystal sharp screen gives a great web-experience. With 3G you can watch streaming clips from YouTube. If you take photos and video, it is now very speedy to take these off onto your PC or iMac via USB compared with previous Blackberry models.

AT&T and Blackberry put some good thought into the UI and the look and feel. The themes are crisp and fresh. I seem to have Wifi and Bluetooth switched on at all times. Even by doing that, the battery lasts a good 1.5 days with pretty heavy use. I have to say even though the device is 3G, I don’t notice it making a huge difference with normal Blackberry use. Emails come through the same as the previous models. When you browse, you don’t notice a huge difference either. However, if you download attachments, pictures or applications – that’s when you do notice it making a huge difference.

The camera is the same as my old Curve, 2MP, so no real change there. But again, because of the processing speed of the Bold, the videos I record are crisp and not jumpy

I’ve found two bugs in the software: On one occasion, the red light stayed on constantly and I had to reboot – and the other was that the colours of the writing of the keys in the calculator app sometimes act strangly when pressed. Apart from that, everything else is fine.

The only thing I don’t like too much is the specially commisioned music themes for the Bold by Stewart Copeland. They sound like a two-legged cat walking over my daughters Schoenhut (you might have to Google that!)

Blackberry Bold specifications:

• Size – Length: 114mm, Width: 66mm, Thickness: 14mm
• Weight (with battery) – 133g (same as the 88xx series. I can attest to it!)
• Memory – 1GB on-board (storage) and 128 MB Flash (applications)
• Battery – 1500mAhr lithium cell
• Est. Battery Life – Standby: 13 days, Talk Time: 5 hours
• Network Support – UMTS: 2100 / 1900 / 850MHz, GSM: 1900 / 1800 / 900 / 850 MHz, GPRS, EDGE and HDSPA networks
• Wi-Fi – 803.11a/b/g enabled
• Display – HVGA, 480 x 320 pixels, Transmissive TFT LCD, supports over 65k colors
• Media Player, Video Support – DivX 4, Div X 5 & 6 are partially supported, XviD is partially supported, H.263, H.264 and WMV3
• Media Player, Audio Support – .3gp, MP3, WMA9 (.wma/.asf), WMA9 Pro/WMA 10, MIDI, AMR-NB, Professional AAC/AAC+/eAAC+
• Media Player, Audio – BlackBerry Media Sync allows you to transfer your desktop iTunes music to your BlackBerry
• Camera – 2.0MP, 5 x digital zoom (with flash)
• GPS – internal GPS with extended ephemeris
• Bluetooth – Bluetooth v2.0, all the normal stuff and Bluetooth Stereo Audio via A2DP and AVCRP
• USB Port – Enables charging and high-speed data synchronizations via USB
• Browser – HTML browsing, view movies/clips from websites built for mobile streaming, RSS feed support
• Cost with USA AT&T from $299.99 for 2 year contract or upgrade with rebate – the no commitment price $549.99 (as at 20 Nov 08)

Something like a blog takes a lot of upkeep, (it’s been well over a month since I last blogged. The gap between the posts before that was only a week)

Then you have Facebook, Flickr, Vimeo, Friendfeed, Twitter, etc. Perhaps it’s time for me to rationalise? If I was to keep all this afloat it would take a fair chunk of my day.

That’s my point. Times change, priorities change. Workloads change. It really is a full-time job. Priorities and workloads have changed for me. I’m so behind:

• I haven’t updated my 365day Flickr project for well over a week. I have the photos, but haven’t uploaded them
• I haven’t ducked into Facebook for a long time now
• I Twitter regularly as I can do that easily on the move in downtime via my Blackberry
• I haven’t encoded and uploaded my backlog of video to put on Vimeo for a long time
• My career related networking sites such as Linkedin are getting out-of-date
• The photos I’ve taken over the last few weeks are backing up on my memory cards, rather than being edited and uploaded

It’s all mounting up. Have you thought about giving up some parts of social networking? If so, what are you cutting back on?

However, today I made progress. I currently have my service with AT&T. I made a call to their support line, got passed around between three different operators – then got passed directly onto RIM after 55 minutes. (I do have a direct phone number for RIM technical support now – but I won’t share it here – what’s it worth eh?)

Once I got through, their email specialist added my domains to a recognised Gmail account list. I then recreated my email addresses within the AT&T BIS control panel, the settings were picked up for Gmail compatibility automatically – then voila – proper Gmail push email and syncronisation for my Blackberry on my hosted domains.

It was a bit of a struggle, (One hour and 19 minutes of my day) but I got there in the end. Thanks Matt at RIM technical support!

Download the Facebook software from Blackberry here to install via your USB lead.

Google IMAP FAQs

In the time I have found to play on the PS3, I’ve loved it. I have two games so far, Resistance: Fall of Man, which is awesome, and F1 Championship Edition which is so real on my high-definition TV, visitors to Chez Burden think the F1 on the telly is real. The PS3 is a great machine and I also love the online gaming functionality and the ability to play games via my PSP linked through to the PS3. Downloading HD trailers and demo games is pretty quick with the PS3 linked up to my Linksys wireless N router. Something that is changing the way we do things at home is that the PS3 is becoming a central media centre for pictures, video and browsing the web. My friend Paul who works at Microsoft has called me a traitor – I’m sorry Paul.

I am still trying to upload all my photos to my new Flickr account that I opened on April 20. Even though I have a very fast internet connection at home and most evenings I let the computer run overnight, I’m still around 2000+ photos away from completion. Flickr really needs to create a better way to upload multiple photos. I find the software uploader a little flaky and liable to break. It needs an FTP facility for sure, but reading the forums, people have been asking for this for a long time now.

As I write this, I’ve been saddened to hear that the 19th century boat, built in 1869, The Cutty Sark, has been pretty much destroyed by what looks like a suspicious fire. I have great memories of going out in Greenwich with friends with the fantastic Sark rising up from the dry dock for all to see. I hope much can be saved and renovated.

• Average age of the Executive Officers, 43
• They feel they face significant risk and competition from Microsoft and Yahoo, companies that bundle their services with internet access, traditional media companies, large advertisers who do not spend their budgets with Google
• That 7% of its revenues came from AOL last year, and that a year ago it valued AOL at $20 billion when it bought 5%
• The company’s headcount has doubled in the last 12 months to 10,600 employees
• Google has taken $150 million in stock out of that price and put it in escrow to cover copyright lawsuits
• They feel their revenue will slow and there will be pressure on their operating margin in the future
• Innovation is key, if they fail to maintain their innovative nature, it will create pressure on operating results
• 99% of their revenue was from advertising alone, if advertisers fail to spend on Google, it directly hits their bottom line – also, new technology may block their ads
• It has $11 billion of cash in the bank and made $461m in interest

Email and general Blackberry addiction is now officially recognised by experts and Marsha Egan is now putting together a 12 step plan to pull you away from your Crackberry.

Some of the steps include:

• admit that email is managing you
• let go of your need to check email every ten minutes
• commit to keeping your inbox empty
• establish regular times to review your email
• deal immediately with any email that can be handed in two minutes or less, create a file for mails that will take longer

Egan also states that workers who receive an email take four minutes to read it and mentally recover from the interruption before that can resume working productively. She also recommends checking emails not more than three or four times a day. Yeah right.

You can order your E-ddiction Detox Programme here:

http://eganemailsolutions.com/addiction.html

I also have read today about phantom vibrations for users with a Blackberry in a hip holster. Apparently, people are starting to feel their device vibrate, even though it’s not, as mentally they want to have an email coming through!

Find out more here:

http://jscms.jrn.columbia.edu/cns/2005-05-03/orso-phantomvibes

Now back to my Outlook inbox that has 47 unread emails in it.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6389581.stm

Mr “T” comes along to tackle corporate zombies and mindless drones, breaks down the virtualisation wall and kills the consultant – his brain tastes of chicken by the way. Make sense? Not really?! Perhaps this video will explain. Stop your jibber jabber, I pity da fool…

So far, so good though. I really like this phone. I went with the 8100 as I wanted to get a camera so I could blog via email with images and I also wanted something smaller and thinner – more phone like I guess.

The phone is performing well, I set it up pretty quickly with personal and enterprise mail and the speed of the phone seems just fine. The software included with the Pearl lets you backup your important stuff from your old Blackberry to transfer to the new.

The biggest adjustment is moving away from a full QWERTY keyboard to the Blackberry Suretype, predictive typing where you have two letters per key. I’ve found already that if you try and concentrate and deliberately try to press the correct keys, you can misspell and make errors. If you don’t think about it too much and pretend there is a full QWERTY keyboard there and type as you would normally, then things seem to work well. Make sense? No?!

It has Blackberry Maps, but I’ve already superseded that by downloading Google Maps for Mobile, which is much better.

Pet hates so far, (which I hope I’ll just get used to over time):

• the shortcut keys have changed. I miss the “C” to compose new mail, “M” to go to messages, “K” to lock the keyboard etc
• as our IT department has strict password policies, I have to have a complicated password to unlock my device, and doing that via the predictive texting is cumbersome
• the screen is obviously less wide than the traditional Blackberry, but I’m getting used to it. The browser has an interesting preview function where you can see a mini representation of a web page and scroll around in that and zoom into the piece you want to see in greater detail
• The Pearl doesn’t come with a holster, which I miss

Positives include:

• the camera – even though the lens is only a 1.3 megapixel the images produced seem to be of a good quality. You can then attach these images to a MMS or an email and send to your friends! The built in flash and digital zoom (5x) works incredibly well. If you want to send photos via email, your Blackberry Enterprise Server has to be v4.1 SP2 or higher
• self taught predictive text – I’ve seen some dumb predictive text in my time, but the Blackberry not only learns from you to compile extra words, but it also looks at web pages you visit, contacts you have and emails sent to you to look for words not in the standard dictionary – clever
• voice activated dialing (VAD) works really well
• the Pearl control button – this makes things very easy to navigate, however I still find my thumb moving down to the right side of the phone looking for a track wheel!
• room for a microSD card – the strange thing is that this is buried below the battery, so it’s not like this can be removed/replaced easily
• Multi-media player seems OK, but I haven’t tried that much yet

This page will be a work-in-progress as I find out more.

http://hitachi.us/truestories/

Some of the facts about Google are just mind-blowing. They have 6,500 US based employees and 3,000 based elsewhere. They have increased their staffing by 67% over the last twelve months and – most impressive of all – if you’ve sent your resume to their HR Department, don’t hang around by your phone waiting for that important call, Google recieved 1,145,000 applications last year.

This “Best Companies” list is US specific, but it’s an interesting one nonetheless.

Garlinghouse goes onto tackle the following issues:

• [Yahoo] lack[s] a focused, cohesive vision. I think this is something that can only be communicated from the top – and normally the communication channels are the things to blame
• [Yahoo] lack[s] clarity of ownership and accountability (in my experience once a company tries to tackle too many things, spreads people too thinly and has no direction this happens by default
• [Yahoo] lacks decisiveness. Again, the lack of ownership comes into play here. If you have no true ownership, a company can find itself in a stalemate where employees will find it easy to say “no” and play it safe, rather than say “yes”. They become disillusioned and leave. Yahoo is starting to compete against itself with the applications it offers
• Yahoo want to blow apart the matrix management and kill redundancies within the company

Again, I think it’s an excellent memo. Rather than me bang on about the virtues, take a look for yourself by clicking here, or read it below.

Three and half years ago, I enthusiastically joined Yahoo! The magnitude of the opportunity was only matched by the magnitude of the assets. And an amazing team has been responsible for rebuilding Yahoo!

It has been a profound experience. I am fortunate to have been a part of dramatic change for the Company. And our successes speak for themselves. More users than ever, more engaging than ever and more profitable than ever!

I proudly bleed purple and yellow everyday! And like so many people here, I love this company

But all is not well. Last Thursday’s NY Times article was a blessing in the disguise of a painful public flogging. While it lacked accurate details, its conclusions rang true, and thus was a much needed wake up call. But also a call to action. A clear statement with which I, and far too many Yahoo’s, agreed. And thankfully a reminder. A reminder that the measure of any person is not in how many times he or she falls down – but rather the spirit and resolve used to get back up. The same is now true of our Company.

It’s time for us to get back up.

I believe we must embrace our problems and challenges and that we must take decisive action. We have the opportunity – in fact the invitation – to send a strong, clear and powerful message to our shareholders and Wall Street, to our advertisers and our partners, to our employees (both current and future), and to our users. They are all begging for a signal that we recognize and understand our problems, and that we are charting a course for fundamental change. Our current course and speed simply will not get us there. Short-term band-aids will not get us there.

It’s time for us to get back up and seize this invitation.

I imagine there’s much discussion amongst the Company’s senior most leadership around the challenges we face. At the risk of being redundant, I wanted to share my take on our current situation and offer a recommended path forward, an attempt to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

Recognizing Our Problems

We lack a focused, cohesive vision for our company. We want to do everything and be everything — to everyone. We’ve known this for years, talk about it incessantly, but do nothing to fundamentally address it. We are scared to be left out. We are reactive instead of charting an unwavering course. We are separated into silos that far too frequently don’t talk to each other. And when we do talk, it isn’t to collaborate on a clearly focused strategy, but rather to argue and fight about ownership, strategies and tactics.

Our inclination and proclivity to repeatedly hire leaders from outside the company results in disparate visions of what winning looks like — rather than a leadership team rallying around a single cohesive strategy.

I’ve heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular.

I hate peanut butter. We all should.

We lack clarity of ownership and accountability. The most painful manifestation of this is the massive redundancy that exists throughout the organization. We now operate in an organizational structure — admittedly created with the best of intentions — that has become overly bureaucratic. For far too many employees, there is another person with dramatically similar and overlapping responsibilities. This slows us down and burdens the company with unnecessary costs.

Equally problematic, at what point in the organization does someone really OWN the success of their product or service or feature? Product, marketing, engineering, corporate strategy, financial operations… there are so many people in charge (or believe that they are in charge) that it’s not clear if anyone is in charge. This forces decisions to be pushed up – rather than down. It forces decisions by committee or consensus and discourages the innovators from breaking the mold… thinking outside the box.

There’s a reason why a centerfielder and a left fielder have clear areas of ownership. Pursuing the same ball repeatedly results in either collisions or dropped balls. Knowing that someone else is pursuing the ball and hoping to avoid that collision – we have become timid in our pursuit. Again, the ball drops.

We lack decisiveness. Combine a lack of focus with unclear ownership, and the result is that decisions are either not made or are made when it is already too late. Without a clear and focused vision, and without complete clarity of ownership, we lack a macro perspective to guide our decisions and visibility into who should make those decisions. We are repeatedly stymied by challenging and hairy decisions. We are held hostage by our analysis paralysis.

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

We have lost our passion to win. Far too many employees are “phoning” it in, lacking the passion and commitment to be a part of the solution. We sit idly by while — at all levels — employees are enabled to “hang around”. Where is the accountability? Moreover, our compensation systems don’t align to our overall success. Weak performers that have been around for years are rewarded. And many of our top performers aren’t adequately recognized for their efforts.

As a result, the employees that we really need to stay (leaders, risk-takers, innovators, passionate) become discouraged and leave. Unfortunately many who opt to stay are not the ones who will lead us through the dramatic change that is needed.

Solving our Problems

We have awesome assets. Nearly every media and communications company is painfully jealous of our position. We have the largest audience, they are highly engaged and our brand is synonymous with the Internet.

If we get back up, embrace dramatic change, we will win.

I don’t pretend there is only one path forward available to us. However, at a minimum, I want to be part of the solution and thus have outlined a plan here that I believe can work. It is my strong belief that we need to act very quickly or risk going further down a slippery slope, The plan here is not perfect; it is, however, FAR better than no action at all.

There are three pillars to my plan:

1. Focus the vision.

2. Restore accountability and clarity of ownership.

3. Execute a radical reorganization.

1. Focus the vision

a) We need to boldly and definitively declare what we are and what we are not.

b) We need to exit (sell?) non core businesses and eliminate duplicative projects and businesses.

My belief is that the smoothly spread peanut butter needs to turn into a deliberately sculpted strategy — that is narrowly focused.

We can’t simply ask each BU to figure out what they should stop doing. The result will continue to be a non-cohesive strategy. The direction needs to come decisively from the top. We need to place our bets and not second guess. If we believe Media will maximize our ROI — then let’s not be bashful about reducing our investment in other areas. We need to make the tough decisions, articulate them and stick with them — acknowledging that some people (users / partners / employees) will not like it. Change is hard.

2. Restore accountability and clarity of ownership

a) Existing business owners must be held accountable for where we find ourselves today — heads must roll,

b) We must thoughtfully create senior roles that have holistic accountability for a particular line of business (a variant of a GM structure that will work with Yahoo!’s new focus)

c) We must redesign our performance and incentive systems.

I believe there are too many BU leaders who have gotten away with unacceptable results and worse — unacceptable leadership. Too often they (we!) are the worst offenders of the problems outlined here. We must signal to both the employees and to our shareholders that we will hold these leaders (ourselves) accountable and implement change.

By building around a strong and unequivocal GM structure, we will not only empower those leaders, we will eliminate significant overhead throughout our multi-headed matrix. It must be very clear to everyone in the organization who is empowered to make a decision and ownership must be transparent. With that empowerment comes increased accountability — leaders make decisions, the rest of the company supports those decisions, and the leaders ultimately live/die by the results of those decisions.

My view is that far too often our compensation and rewards are just spreading more peanut butter. We need to be much more aggressive about performance based compensation. This will only help accelerate our ability to weed out our lowest performers and better reward our hungry, motivated and productive employees.

3. Execute a radical reorganization

a) The current business unit structure must go away.

b) We must dramatically decentralize and eliminate as much of the matrix as possible.

c) We must reduce our headcount by 15-20%.

I emphatically believe we simply must eliminate the redundancies we have created and the first step in doing this is by restructuring our organization. We can be more efficient with fewer people and we can get more done, more quickly. We need to return more decision making to a new set of business units and their leadership. But we can’t achieve this with baby step changes, We need to fundamentally rethink how we organize to win.

Independent of specific proposals of what this reorganization should look like, two key principles must be represented:

Blow up the matrix. Empower a new generation and model of General Managers to be true general managers. Product, marketing, user experience & design, engineering, business development & operations all report into a small number of focused General Managers. Leave no doubt as to where accountability lies.

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.

I love Yahoo! I’m proud to admit that I bleed purple and yellow. I’m proud to admit that I shaved a Y in the back of my head.

My motivation for this memo is the adamant belief that, as before, we have a tremendous opportunity ahead. I don’t pretend that I have the only available answers, but we need to get the discussion going; change is needed and it is needed soon. We can be a stronger and faster company – a company with a clearer vision and clearer ownership and clearer accountability.

We may have fallen down, but the race is a marathon and not a sprint. I don’t pretend that this will be easy. It will take courage, conviction, insight and tremendous commitment. I very much look forward to the challenge.

So let’s get back up.

Catch the balls.

And stop eating peanut butter.