CEO Connect at DoMS-IIT Madras Features MD & Strategy Head of Yahoo! India

CEO Connect at DoMS-IIT Madras Features MD & Strategy Head of Yahoo! India

He also added that all the subjects across all functional areas learnt in a B-school are important, and one will never know when a concept learnt in one functional area may be applicable in another functional area, and also possibly provide elegant solutions to the problems in that functional area.

To be eventually at the top, one should either be well-informed about all the areas, and should have attempted to take decisions and decide which of these will really work and which wont. This is possible only when the manager can generate various options / strategies that are a blend of various functionalities. To highlight this point, he gave an anecdote of his Madura Coats days wherein production constraints were really the reason for the lack of sales, and how just by addressing the "constraints" in production, they were able to step-up the production from 4,000 to 10,000 trousers in a matter of few months with 25 lakhs expenditure.

In the subsequent Q&A session, many questions both related to the company and the speaker's career were addressed. The first question that was posed was how Google and Orkut stand as a threat to Yahoo! and how Yahoo! addresses this threat. This was answered by giving an outline of how Google started of its business and how the search process has transformed from blind word based to the pointed knowledge based search. Yahoo! being a pioneer in knowledge based search has launched the Yahoo! answers wherein people can post questions about any topic and get it answered online. The speaker stressed that this was made possible by "harnessing the collective knowledge of the web community".

The next was how Yahoo! perceived the open source code in the Internet. The speaker replied saying that this is a shift towards "Individual Capitalism" and Yahoo! is taking steps to harness this efficiently.

Replying to the question on censorship of websites, he unambiguously stressed that it was a necessary evil without which the cyber space would become a breeding ground of malfeasance. Replying on how he envisages the future of Yahoo!, due to the decreasing costs of computing and storage and the Internet usage, the Ad revenues being already less in India, there will be a push for Yahoo! to go into seeking for innovative platforms and forms of Net usage, and Yahoo! answers is one of such pioneering moves by the company.

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Contributed by -
N. Sriram,
MBA - II Year,
DoMS, IIT Madras.

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