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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."
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 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?
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.'"
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?
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.
A few months ago I would have agreed with you. However, Warren Buffett thinks enough of her to add her to Berkshire Hathaway's Board of Directors. I will defer to his judgement on this one.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
...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.