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Jerry Yang Resigns From Yahoo
PattonPending writes "It seems that the long tenure of Jerry Yang at Yahoo has ended. Yahoo's board released a letter that Yang wrote announcing his retirement, saying, in part: 'My time at Yahoo!, from its founding to the present, has encompassed some of the most exciting and rewarding experiences of my life. However, the time has come for me to pursue other interests outside of Yahoo! As I leave the company I co-founded nearly 17 years ago, I am enthusiastic about the appointment of Scott Thompson as Chief Executive Officer and his ability, along with the entire Yahoo! leadership team, to guide Yahoo! into an exciting and successful future.'"
I've never quite been able to figure Yahoo. They went boring-corporate early, but never quite managed a full changeover to irrelevance.
As late as ~2005 they contacted me (anon, so I can say) as part of a web-dev famous-name dream-team they wanted to assemble.
They'd decided that being no.2 to Google just wasn't a recipe for survival; they'd have to be better to simply survive. They'd have to be smarter than Google about the Web.
So they asked all their web devs, 'Who are the Names? Who do you read? Who do you want to work with?' and then set off on a CEO-mandated mission to hire those people. Good offices, good projects, staff masseuses -- the old days brought back and amplified. Serious bait.
As far as I could tell, they never managed to get anyone. And since their web-savvy didn't change, they didn't seem to empower their in-house staff any either. The project went nowhere, at least from what I could see on the outside.
Actually if you look at the numbers yahoo is number one or number two in worldwide webmail, and I can tell you from my little shop that the vast majority of home users that come through my door have their homepage set to yahoo.com. That is one thing Yahoo has done right, while you or I might think its a cluttered POS talking to ordinary folks Yahoo has taken the place of the morning paper, they fire up Yahoo and check the local and national headlines, check the weather and their horoscope, all the things folks did with their morning paper they now do with Yahoo.
As for the MSFT deal it shows me TWO things: One Yang is an arrogant ass since he turned down an offer that was more than twice the highest yahoo stock has EVER traded at, and two it shows me Steve Ballmer is right up there with the Pepsi guy at Apple for being the biggest dipshit CEO. offering $33 for Yahoo, what are you nuts? He probably could have bought the only two bits worth anything to MSFT, the webmail and the searches, for less than a quarter of that and let yang have the portal. Instead Ballmer gets a case of the stupids and offers insane money, which yang being just as dumbshit turned down. If I was a Yahoo shareholder i'd have wanted yang's head for that dumbshit move, just look at the stock now, what's it trading at, $13? And MSFT offered $33? Stupid.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
This wasn't even Jerry's fault.
Yahoo had management problems ever since their old board was so enamored by AOL buying Time Warner that they wanted to become a copycat-media-company and decided to hire that Warner Bros Hollywood guy who didn't know anything about the internet.
If it weren't for that guy, Yahoo could have had it all.
* Geocities could have been Facebook+Myspace if they further developed their webrings social features.
* Altavista + Overture + Inktomi could have ruled search if they didn't decide to outsource their own search first to Google and then to Bing.
* Broadcast.com could have been Youtube if they encouraged user content.
* I would have stuck with Yahoo Mail if they had sane quotas and IMAP.
But they wanted to become AOL-Time-Warner-II so much that the board picked a Warner Brothers exec for CEO in 2001 or so; and nothing Jerry could do could fix that issue.
Resigned after 9 years. Sold all his stock. Apple III had failed. Mac was fine, but the board wanted an "adult" in charge. Steve returned in 12 years.
something I picked up from /. is putting a period anywhere in the address still reaches your real email address, so if you sign up for something you can track down who is giving away your email address if you get spam at s.omename@gmail.com i think you get the idea....
yeah... And it's awesome that as much as 30% of the websites on the intarwebs will accept an email address with a '+' in it...
Mmm-hmm...
Almost all his stock. He kept one share so he would continue to get the shareholders report.
Be relentless!