1) Her expertise is running Yahoo.  She wouldn't have had enough credibility to talk about starting a company.  She talked about running a company, which is what she knows.

2) That wasn't her actual solution, she was joking.  Yahoo email does have feedback, but she couldn't just respond with that fact of course.

I actually enjoyed the presentation and thought it was very educational even if it might have been recycled slides from a "sales pitch" or some corporate presentation. True, Yahoo! has not done very well recently, but I thought it was really cool how she, as president of one of a huge company, was willing to point out their mistakes over the past few years and how they've gotten to the bad place they are now. I agree that she did not really address any points specifically pertaining to entrepreneurship and startups, but her experience is primarily dealing with how to integrate parts of a very large corporate, so you can't share experiences you don't have.

I enjoyed Sue's talk, but it made me wonder about Yahoo's future direction. It seemed clear from her talk that Yahoo would like to position itself as a gateway to several valuable online "properties"- search, email, ebay/paypal, etc. However, the company seems unable to maintain its lead in any of these fields, and has yet to release any earth-shaking new products that can give it a competitive edge. I would have liked to hear more about Yahoo's strategy for innovation, particularly in products or services that might help it catch up to (or better yet, leapfrog) its competition (most prominently, Google).

I agree with Sameh.  I was expecting something more from Sue Decker, being the President of Yahoo.  I understand that she must have been busy lately and probably didn't have much time to prepare for this speech specifically, but I would have liked more insight on the Entrepreneurial side of her story.  How did she become the President of Yahoo, was this something she always worked towards, and what were her greatest challenges along the way?  These are the types of things I would have liked to hear her discuss in her speech.

I was a little disappointed too. I didn't really feel like Yahoo actually had gotten the point and figured out what they needed to do to change what they were doing. I think in order to really succeed they need to simplify a lot more and cut down the features that no one even uses or knows exists instead of just trying to add in more stuff to link it all together somehow. The key to facebook and google is that everyone knows all the features because they only added on little by little once their customers were actually hooked. Yahoo just need to cut down cut down cut down and get the customers familiar with the basics before they try to add a million other things.

There are two types of presentations by people who are too busy to prepare them - open with "I thought we'd just have a dialogue and open up to questions" and "Here's a tenuously related set of slides that'll have to do". I'm being harsh - Sue has bigger fish to fry at the moment and made a decent show of explaining what and where Yahoo! is at the moment. I think we all came away with the stereotypical impression of this company - unfocused, drifting but still holding it together.

I agree with what a lot of people have mentioned here. Her presentation wasn't necessarily oriented towards ETL and yet it was insightful in the sense that Yahoo clearly lacks direction. Their method seems to be one of just trying to develop / acquire new products and hoping they hit the jackpot and as yet this strategy has been lacking.