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Yahoo Co-Founder Yang Now In Charge
Raver32 writes "Yahoo Inc. Chairman Terry Semel ended his six-year tenure as chief executive officer today and will hand over the reins to co-founder Jerry Yang in the Internet icon's latest attempt to regain investor confidence.
Semel, 64, will remain chairman in a non-executive role.
Besides naming Yang as its new CEO, Yahoo appointed Susan Decker as its president. Decker, who had been recently promoted to oversee Yahoo's advertising operations, had widely been seen as Semel's heir apparent."
Okay, mod me down. You still know it's true.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Yahoo has been run into the ground because it was treated like a telcom. The employees have minimal incentive to really innovate. If they return to treating employees like part owners (the way they use and the way that Google currently does), then they stand a chance to compete. Until then, they will remain a second rate search engine.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Always quit while you're #1 - from TFA: "Semel ranked No. 1 on The Associated Press' survey of 2006 executive compensation with $71.7 million (U.S.)"
I'm guessing Yahoo's performance was not quite #1 though.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
notice a pattern? Founder returning to take charge when things are bad, like in the case of Dell, Apple
I bet Jerry Yang shouted "YAHOO" when he got his new CEO business cards.
Yahoo! shareholders are really going to take it in the Ying-Yang!
You're right about Decker, she climbed the affirmative action ladder. A white man with her skills would be a no-name first line supervisor.
Always quit while you're #1 - from TFA: "Semel ranked No. 1
How much of that was royalties from the American Pie movies?on The Associated Press' survey of 2006 executive compensation
with $71.7 million (U.S.)"
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
I am the IT Program Manager for a small community college and I think the Yahoo! business portal is an excellent resource for small business owners looking to establish an online presence they can update and maintain themselves. There are lots of other good tools there for market research and general business knowledge. So I am developing a course that will teach small business owners the ins and outs of the Yahoo! program. Yesterday I spent two hours getting transferred to and from various different departments in the Yahoo! corporate system, only to end up repeatedly with the operator at the corporate office who insisted she couldn't transfer me to a live body unless and until I could provide a name and an extension. No good explaining that was the reason I was calling - to try and identity a name and extension that might be able to offer some materials and maybe some guidance in developing the program. In the time I spent discussing this with various Yahoo! representatives, I was transferred, placed on terminal hold, hung up on, and in the end unable to identify a single resource person in the entire company who could assist me. The trick is, I know they must exist! Like many large companies, there just wasn't any mechanism in place for people whose issues don't fall neatly into some predetermined category or script. Nobody willing to take a few minutes and think outside the bloody box. What another poster said was spot on. Note to Jerry - no innovation when you are an innovation company is why you are floundering. Cheers!
$6.5B in gross income, $3.7B in gross profit, $37B in market cap?
Oh, that I could be so second rate!
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
...had the "enterprise" taken away from them by the chief yahoo. (ST:TMP references...what too obscure for you?)
Over the last 6 years (Semel's tenure), Yahoo's stock moved down all in all. Of course, that is mostly because 6 years ago was almost the height of the bubble, but still. It doesn't say much for his leadership. Nonetheless, I predict some other corporation gives him a fat deal now.
Yahoo suffers from "terrible first impression syndrome". They actually do have a lot of great services. Their webmail is just as good as gmail. What kills them is their home page. I put it somewhere between teen magazine and ad farm. They have to make their homepage look more professional. The next step is to reduce the size (and bandwidth requirements) of their ads. Try using yahoo maps. It is basically the same as google maps, except that is a big fat ads in the lower left hand corner that updates every time you click. Consequently the maps update much slower the google maps.
Yahoo's main selling points to me are its New Service and its Email(which I rarely us anymore). The only problem they have is the completion. Unless Yahoo has the next major advance in internet technology their stock should drop like a rock and replacing the CEO aint going to help. BTW just because you replace the current CEO with a company founder doesn't advance your placement in technologically.
They need to give back to the community in ways that corporate mentality does not permit.
They also need to make some serious technical advancements to work against their currently spammy environment. Once they get the spammy nature of their internet operations back under control, they can focus on community projects to build a fan-base which they sorely need and then start to work on professional services.
It's not just "too easy" to be an advertiser, it marks against them. They need to at least APPEAR to be a community force on the internet that happens to do a little advertising on the side to pay the bills.
Yeah, and I'm going to remain floor-mopper in a non-janitorial role.
How do you have a non-executive chairman? That's like a non-bread biscuit.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Here are my gripes — why I sold the YHOO-chunk of my portfolio:
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Yahoo, like MS, is simply copying and stealing from Google and Others. They need to be innovative again. At this time, they are not. Even in your post, you compare to Google. You (and others) no longer say that it is better.
BTW, MS has the same issue. MS has always stolen/copied others ideas. But normally, they do a one up and make it better. But lately, MS has not even been doing that good. At this time, they are fighting multiple fronts and trying a number of different approaches to kill it all off (OSS/Mac/Google/OpenOffice/etc IS hurting MS).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Liked the post, but disagree with the statement above on two counts:
I used to work in Engineering at Yahoo!, and still love the company. The founders, Jerry and David, are still around every day. They are the most normal and humble people you could imagine, and they created an environment that is devoid of the brassy arrogance that is so typical of places like Google.
In 2000, though, Yahoo! pushed strongly for media and content partnerships, thinking that places like Sports, Movies, News were going to be the engines of growth. Yahoo! forgot it is first of all a technology company whose users and customers expect world class products, not world class feeds. When Google came about, it focused strongly on products and technology, and Yahoo! was not in a position to fight back. It wasn't because it believed in the wrong strategy, but most importantly because the people at the helm didn't know how to fight a product battle.
Once Yahoo! decided that Search was the application without whom it would be dead, it spent billions of dollars and many, many man-years to get to a new search strategy. They put Jeff Weiner in charge, one of Terry's media execs, and he didn't understand that what he needed was innovation. Instead, the company focused on making search more prominent, and on catching up with Google. On the Internet, though, offering the same product as the market leader makes you just irrelevant.
I held a little position in Yahoo! until the restructuring of late last year: They canned the COO, Dan Rosenzweig, and the head of media, but the two guys most responsible for the debacle were promoted. That's Jeff Weiner and the CTO, Narzad Farzem (known as zod, which always sounded a little too close to 'god' for comfort). At that point I realized Yahoo! still hadn't understood it needed new leadership in technology and an innovation strategy, and that the loss of the search business was home-made.
I, for one, welcome the advent of the overlord Jerry. It is probably just a caretaker role until Sue (Decker) takes over, but it's a chance to break with the past and to connect the lack of progress with lack of change where it matters.
Yahoo! always struck me as the company where the intelligence is bottom heavy, at least in the Engineering department. Yahoo! has some terrific talent that is just waiting to create killer products, once the disarray and sheer incompetence in the management hierarchy is removed.
What a coincidence. My yang is in charge, too!
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
While Semel may be a business expert, what made Yahoo! was its understanding of how to use the net. If you think business-model-first, then you make what exists more profitable. But for profit to exist, it must first be useful.
I am hoping Jerry Yang will return Yahoo's focus to the useful. Many great and creative products have come out of Yahoo, albeit in a disunified, confused, under-promoted way. If he can tie them together into a strategy of how people use the net, like the original Yahoo directory did, he may be on to something.
I also hope they rebuild and continue the Yahoo directory project. As someone who routinely encounters too many junk hits in Google to make searches efficient, I'd like to see a dual-pane search that gives (a) raw results from the search engine and (b) search results from an updated, RDF-tagged, classified and vetted Yahoo directory.
A legend continues... this news makes me smile (despite a lack of corporate loyalty of fanboism, of course).
technical writing / development
Many many many times, mediocre is good enough to allow companies to remain significantly profitable, even with poor leadership.
If you consider $3B in profits to be "continuing to fail" then I'd love to see your definition of success!
Perhaps Yahoo is focusing on a market who simply doesn't understand that it *could* be better than Yahoo currently is. No one goes out of business underestimating the lack of intelligence in the population. Lowest common denominator can make lots of money. Perhaps it's their strategy.
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
Given the post immediately above ("sibling post" I guess), this is actually kind of funny.
gg troll...
New punctuation update "~" (no quotes) at the end of a line to indicate sarcasm. ~
Does this mean employees will no longer be able to watch Semel's Academy Award screeners in the cafeteria?
He personally sold over 500 million sold in stock via options while he was there, over paid at any cost to the corp. He is the poster child of what is corrupt and wrong with western multinationals.
...some sort of directory, or maybe a search engine. I hear the google mini is pretty good for these kinds of applications.
Jerry Yang is not a visionary. He is no Steve Jobs, he's not even a Bill Gates or a Sergei Whatever or Larry Page. He was a Ph.D student who got really, really, really lucky and became a billionaire. His idea was just a bunch of cool sites to go visit, there wasn't even an algorithm behind it.
Yahoo and the internet is a very complex business and requires business savvy. Yang should just spend his money, date model and movie stars and leave it at that. Taking the reins of Yahoo and trying to manage their entire portfolio of businesses is far too complex for someone who doesn't have decades of experience that someone like Semel had. Think about things like branding, partnerships, etc. How do you expect Yang to handle complex business decisions like that?? The short answer is that he can't and won't.
No, Semel did no succeed against Google, however, he had a good idea. Treat Yahoo like a media company, which it is. Google went a different way, and it paid off better. But as a company, Yahoo did not do poorly. It's just that the competition did way better.
imo, it's not a good sign for a tech company when somebody from Advertising takes over--'Innovation' then morphs into something like 'resized layout grid to fit in more ads.'
The Y! directory was reborn the day they decided to buy out del.icio.us ...
Now, if only they'd integrate delcious data into search in a somewhat controlled manner, it'd kick ass.
Right now, they're sitting on one of the biggest collection of urls tagged and with notes.
Yin, whose official press release was a blistering "no comment", has been overheard remarking off the record that he will "have his day again."
... couldn't resist)
(sorry
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Yahoo has a few things going for it. For one, it's an excellent news portal and entertainment portal. I think one of the things that are hurting Yahoo is their too close relationship with Internet Explorer at the exclusion of other browsers (i.e. Firefox). I can't access a lot of Yahoo's content with my browser of choice which is not IE; hence, I don't use Yahoo as much as I would other wise. I suspect many Firefox users share my experiences.
What are you using in Yahoo that doesn't work for you in Firefox? I've used Mail and Photos, both of which are very AJAX-y, and they both work great in Firefox--in fact Photos even had a Firefox plug-in so I could drag photos into the browser (too bad their shutting it down in favor of Flickr now, since it actually let you view and download full-res photos for free). I know that Yahoo are kind of dicks about letting you use Konqueror and the like, but Firefox at least has always worked fine for everything I've used...
http://www.infoplease.com/spot/womenceo1.html
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
From Yahoo's website:
"A key member of Yahoo!'s executive team, Susan L. Decker is the head of the Advertiser and Publisher Group (APG). As the head of APG, Decker is a key participant in determining Yahoo!'s business strategy and is focused on transforming how advertisers connect with their target customers on the Internet. Decker's APG organization includes direct and online sales channels, the publisher channel, marketing products, and Local Markets and Commerce. Prior to her APG role, Decker was executive vice president and chief financial officer from June 2000 - June 2007, managing all aspects of the company's financial and administrative direction within key functional areas, including finance, facilities, investor relations (and human resources and legal through December 2006). Decker reports to chairman and chief executive officer, Terry Semel.
Prior to joining Yahoo! in June 2000, Decker was with Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette (DLJ) for 14 years. Most recently, she served as the global director of equity research, a $300 million operation, where, among other things, she was responsible for building and staffing a non-U.S. research product based on global sector teams. Before serving as DLJ's global and domestic head of research, she spent 12 years as an equity research analyst, providing coverage to institutional investors on more than 30 media, publishing, and advertising stocks. In this capacity, she received recognition by Institutional Investor magazine as a top rated analyst for ten consecutive years.
Decker holds a bachelor of science degree from Tufts University, with a double major in computer science and economics, and a master of business administration degree from Harvard Business School. She also received the designation of Chartered Financial Analyst in 1989 and served on the Financial Accounting Standards Advisory Council (FASAC) for a four-year term, from January 2000 to January 2004. Decker served on the board of directors of Pixar Animation Studios from June 2004 to May 2006, until its sale to Disney and The Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) from March 2005 to May 2007. Decker currently serves on the board of directors for Berkshire Hathaway, Intel Corporation and Costco Wholesale.
"
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The assertion of the AC is ludicrous, one does not need Warren Buffet to recognize that woman has some serious brains.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
It used to be that investors would materialize a return on investment based in the company's performance via the dividends.
Now "investors" (I called them gamblers, pure semantics) expect a "return on investment" based on the share price.
What you are advocating is simply the economics of the bell curve, in which there are always winners and losers all shaped along the curve, and if you pull some from one side, then you have to add them in the other side.
If people were actually obtaining ROI based on dividends then all could be winners. But lets keep gambling, it is far more exciting.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.