Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang To Step Down

JagsLive was one of several readers to point out Jerry Yang's departure as Yahoo CEO. He's not leaving the company; he will return to his former role as Chief Yahoo, whatever that entails. Yang has been under fire in recent months from investors for his handling of Microsoft's recent acquisition attempt."Yahoo, under fierce financial pressure, has begun a search to replace company co-founder Jerry Yang as chief executive, the company said Monday. 'Jerry and the board have had an ongoing dialogue about succession timing, and we all agree that now is the right time to make the transition to a new CEO who can take the company to the next level,' Chairman Roy Bostock said in a statement."

Comments

Dividends?

[copponex]

I just looked at the YHOO numbers and noticed there is no dividend. Watching some prophetic videos of Peter Schiff, he seems to be saying that every American stock is basically a speculative gamble, and that there is no place to invest in a company with a real balance sheet in the states.

Can anyone "in the business" comment on what he's saying? Is there a possibility of returning to the more formal method of investing as a stake/stockholder and receiving a share of real profits?

Re:Dividends?

[nedlohs]

Can't watch video since I'm on a machine without flash (or sound for that matter), but it's Schiff.

So he'll be pointing out that the US economy is fake, that it's all borrow and consume, and the US dollar is set to drop by a huge amount. And hence you should invest all your money overseas, via his firm of course.

He's basically right in principal, though I think he underestimates just how badly the US bursting will hurt the rest of the world, and he doesn't seem to notice that the US housing bubble is a dwarf compared with the UK... On Asia he's probably right, for the end game anyway.

Owning "growth" stocks that pay no dividends is gambling pure and simple. See Enron for how easy it is to create phantom earnings - it's a little harder to do so when you have to pay that dividend out... But that isn't US specific.

I would expect Schiff to not have any huge problems with US miners (of all sorts), US agriculture, and US oil companies. He does have the reverse of the norm view that the US has more "government risk" than other countries.

As in the US is more likely to declare a "windfall profit tax" and steal your dividends when those companies do very well as the domestic economy collapses or to simply confiscate your gold, etc than say China is. The really sad thing is that he's probably right on that one...

Something everyone always forgets, or just ignores

[Anonymous Coward]

Jerry Yang was never meant to be Yahoo's CEO.

He took ever when Terry Semel took a gigantic shit on the company. He failed to act on Yang's and Filo's suggestion that Yahoo acquire Google when that was still possible. This was when they were still using PageRank, prior to their major search engine acquisitions. I rememnber at the time that this was going on, I was constantly talking to Yahoo people about how much sense it made for them to do so. I also remember the looks on their faces when they all came back with "Semel's not going to do it." He also amassed a private fortune at the company's expense while letting Yahoo go down the drain.

They kicked him to the curb and fell back on Yang as interim CEO. He finally stuck to the position when it looked like that was all that would keep the shareholders happy. But it was simply never supposed to happen.

If I blame Yang for anything, it's for ever letting Semel head the company in the first place.

I've been cheering his rejection of Microsoft...

[jbm]

...and I hope I'm not the only one. I actually use Yahoo Shopping on a regular basis, but if Yahoo were acquired by Microsoft I'd stop immediately, and find an alternate vendor-aggregator. Just a matter of principle (and maybe as much aesthetic as anything), but Microsoft just icks me out.

Kinda funny because it troubles me little to support an empire which would probably be just as evil if it had the same amount of power, Apple's. But Apple has an aesthetic sense, and has thus slipped perhaps-irrationally behind my defenses.

This whole Yahoo mess is also a fine example of the downside of going public -- you have amoral raiders screaming the battlecry "shareholder value" and using that to bludgeon anyone in a company who makes a principled decision which might not maximize stock prices in the short term.

(Mod me +2/-1 incoherent?)

Re:I've been cheering his rejection of Microsoft..

[shutdown -p now]

... a company who makes a principled decision which might not maximize stock prices in the short term.

It's all well and good when there is any "long term" to think about... but in the case of Yahoo, there's simply none. So it was a bad decision no matter how you look at it.

Re:Isn't it kind of sad

[uberotto]

You seem to be missing a fundamental shift that has occurred in the U.S. and around the world over the last 30 years. You are right, the customer is king and that any companies primary goal should be to serve their customers. And in the case of Yahoo, as well as most other large American corporations that's exactly what they are doing...

What you are missing is the shift that has occurred as to who exactly the customer is. Now days, for most large corporations the customer is the stock holder. We, the consumers are the product that is being sold. With Yahoo, Google, MSN etc. it's about how many eyeballs they have looking at their pages. For companies such as Ford, GM, Target, WalMart it's all about the size of their consumer base. That's why Ford and GM don't spend a lot of time building cars that tomorrows consumers might want. Their only focus is to build as many of whatever cars the consumer is buying today.

In this new world, as far as the corporations are concerned we're just a bunch of whores and their all fighting to see who is going to be our pimp.