Yahoo! recently announced that they were going to eliminate telecommuting and everyone went nuts. I'm with them; in practice this won't get Yahoo! anything tangible. But it has accomplished one thing that may, in fact, be incredibly important.
We've talked about Yahoo! more in the last couple of weeks than we have in the last 10 years.
Yahoo! leads in no category. Their original reason for existence, web taxonomies, is dead and buried. They make money, but they lead nothing. They're not going away, but they lead nothing.
A lot of ink has been spilled about how dumb and a little ink has been spilled about how wise the move is but the most important thing is that it got everybody's attention. I used to have a manager who talked about instilling a "sense of urgency" in a team which had drifted. This looks like what's happening at Yahoo! - applying a shock to a patient which may not be dead, may not be dying, but is certainly moribund if not comatose. Another re-face of the home page is not what they need, a rallying cry, a fresh direction, a sense of excitement is.
So don't write the ban off as a completely dumb idea yet. If a couple of months pass and Yahoo! isn't barreling ahead in some new and exciting direction, yes, it's a failure because a simplistic, blinkered managerial edict isn't enough, isn't by itself actual leadership. But let's see if the lights go back on, if the spark re-ignites, if the Silicon Valley electricity re-roots. Yahoo! has everybody's attention. Let's see if they do something with it.
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