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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 really have to wonder if Yahoo should have accepted Microsoft's $45 billion bid, which Yang was roundly criticized for rejecting. It's not like Yahoo has much else going for it besides a few services like Finance, and I don't even know how well that's doing. In my own experience, the only people I see using Yahoo are computer illiterate users with old email accounts there who refuse to switch to Gmail (the kind of people who type URLs into the Yahoo's search field to visit a website). I never used Yahoo other than a vague memory of trying their "internet directory" a few times way back when, but it's a little sad to see them on an apparent decline since they've been such a staple of the web for so long.
As John Gruber put it: "I remember an Internet without Jerry Yang at Yahoo, but I don’t remember a World Wide Web without Jerry Yang at Yahoo."
Scott Thompson?!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZX-sUGWt6o
Yahoo's still around!
Good luck finding someone who will work for his salary. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24376328/ns/business-us_business/t/yahoo-ceo-yang-made-salary-last-year/#.TlfhkF34TSg
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.
Yesterday's news about yesterday's companies!
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
username+throwawaypart@gmail.com will be redirected to username@gmail.com.
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.
Let me preface this statement by saying I love yahoo, or rather I love who theyused to be. I started using yahoo in the akebono days. Back then, Yahoo helped transform the web from a loosely connected set of "hotlists" into a strtuctured entity. They were the cartd catalog for the world wide web, and they owned the space. But they lost their way in the dotcom hype brigade. They tried to be the orginization of the web, the sales front, the noIse maker, ... They built their business on being an organizing force online.
Those days are long gone. They gave it up to be the circus barkers of the internet and are now just like the circus, an outdated spectical with no compelling purpose, kept alive by nostalgia. If Yahoo is to exist in anyrelevant form in 10 years, there needs to be a blood letting. It may be ugly and brutal, but in the end maybe Yahoo will find a reason to exist.
In the end, I am not shedding a tear for Jerry Yang anymore than anyone else who won the lottery.
Mmm-hmm...
I still use Yahoo Finance quite a lot - it's fast, well organized and useful. But if it went away tomorrow, there are alternatives. Yahoo is still making money but their long-term future is starting to look bleak. IMO they should be looking to sell off the valuable pieces while they still have value.
Yahoo will now be known as Yang Who?
-- Insert witty one-liner here. --
Almost all his stock. He kept one share so he would continue to get the shareholders report.
Be relentless!