I’m not saying the following as a blogger, but as
- a search product developer who used Y!’s Search API (well, I managed a team of programmers and developers) and lost all faith in Yahoo!’s IT mojo
- an advertiser who used Y! and then Google, and then never touched Yahoo! again
- a user who slowly but surely moved away from Y! products to Google, mainly
- a former shareholder who finally threw in the towel after much patience in the $28-30 range last month…
I see everyone is calling for a doomsday scenario with all of these VPs, EVPs, SVPs (you get the idea) jumping ship… but is this really a bad thing? I mean, Jerry Yang was the freaking Chief Yahoo! until 1 year ago, and sure, it’s been arguably the most disastrous year at the helm of a company for any CEO I can think of… but Yang can’t really be blamed solely for Yahoo’s mess… all of these folk who are leaving now - who had strategic and operational duties - must have some of the blame, too, no?
I don’t know any of these blokes personally, but why is it that for the past 8 years YHOO has been a sinking ship and many of these people had something to do with it, but now that they’re leaving in droves, suddenly it’s a loss? Come on, these people are leaving because the stock is headed to the toilet as a sale to MSFT was kiboshed, and the capitulation to Google means that Google will outperform YHOO even more.
Anyway… as far as I know, YHOO is salvageable… but the sooner it sheds its old skin, the better. Sure, Yang is a douchebag, we get that… but I am not sure any of these executives leaving are top level material, either, and yes, tops on that list is Sue Decker who has been the de facto leader of this debacle.
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June 20th, 2008 at 2:03 am
good timing on selling that stock. yahoo is a sick company - and i mean it literally. it’s not so much one individual or the other - the whole corpus is sick. the culture favors land grabbing. people who talk rise. the yahoo user is a mere excuse in a show of political gamesmanship. in this decaying body - every cell appears rotten.
the entire fault resides with jerry and david. they are the most manipulable, inept and intellectually incurious founders that i have ever seen. they allowed the rot to set in. they encouraged it to spread. and they don’t even know that it surrounds them and is destroying their baby. in an era where we are surrounded by empirical data on what makes companies and leaders tick - where google has shown how to run an organically innovative internet firm - jerry and david have managed to learn every wrong trick in the trade and reject every right one.
yahoo, jerry and david should be case studies in every business school, in every lesson on personal leadership on what defines failure.