Yahoo! and the GOP? Common factors?

Yahoo! is a perfect example of where the whole is less than the value of its parts. No one knows what or who Yahoo is. When I search, I Google. When I PC, I go Microsoft. When I Mac, I go Apple. When I network, I go Facebook. When I call someone, I go iPhone. But when I Yahoo!, I am stumped. Hence, there stock has headed for the bottom while Bartz, the fired CEO, is headed for silicon valley history. Like a professional operations  executive, Bartz looked for the problem in the income statement and the balance sheet. It wasn't there.

Yahoo! is still a traffic magnet. Visitors, however, are not sticking to the surface very long and advertisers still want to place ads with identifiable branded websites, which Yahoo! is not. The fiasco with China and Alibaba in my opinion is a board of directors error rather than just a CEO issue, but the board does the hiring and the firing from a conundrum castle protected by a moat composed of loosely organized shareholders. Bartz gets phone fired, while the shareholders apparently allow the board to cross the alligator infested moat for free. It ain’t fair, but it is business.

Whoa Nellie? What the sam-hill  does that have to do with politics or Obama or any other of the economic issues you blog about? The answer is branding, my dear loyal self-appointed inquisitor. Yahoo! has no brand identity. Neither has the GOP candidates, or their brand is such that it does not inspire action, or donations to the POTUS hopeful coffers. 

Yahoo! was first with search. Yahoo! owns the critical  pay-for-click patents that made Google founder’s rich. Yahoo made a buck or two off the patents, but nothing like the $billions that the Googlers made. Have I lost you on this analogous reach for a basis of comparison? Yahoo! has many valuable assets, but when they are assembled into a whole business, the business decreases in value. The GOP has many qualified POTUS candidates, some are even running for president, but when they are all together as in a GOP debate, the value of the whole GOP appears far less than the value of the individual candidates. Disagree? Watch the debate tonight.

Yahoo! and the GOP, both have money, but no identity. A famous person almost said it a long time ago, “You can not be all things to all of the people all of the time, but you have to be something, some of the time to somebody.” Let's hope the GOP and Yahoo! solve the identity puzzle. Who are they?