I wonder if Yahoo! lacks the vision of a founder to compare with Gates, Jobs & Woz, Branson, Larry & Sergey, even Zuckerberg?
It's been described as listless and without vision or a clear direction for several years now. Particularly with more macro economic trends, now is a good time for CEOs and business owners to re-engage themselves and their teams with the original vision or intent of their business, to help confirm a new vision moving forward.
I've just never felt that Yahoo! had that baton handed to them by the original founders (I even had to search for their names - Jerry Yang and David Filo). Plenty of companies grow to enormous success without the founder having to drive it, of course, but there's usually some connection that links the CEO to the company's founding principles. Yang is still on the Board I believe - can anyone point me to where his thoughts on the direction might have been shared?
Don't forget – Jerry Yang actually returned to Yahoo! for a period. And completely fucked the dog, screwing up a potential acquisition and being replaced by Bartz. Say what we will about Valleywag, they covered this period pretty well:
He screwed the company's owners out of many millions of dollars. Microsoft may well have killed and gutted the fish, but the CEO's responsibility is to the shareholders.
I see what you mean. But let's say he would have sold to Microsoft and then Microsoft would have killed and gutted the fish, you'd probably be criticizing him for having no vision by selling Yahoo to MS and letting it die like that.
1. he sells for MS.
2. shareholders get some above average return in MS shares.
3. a bunch of companies buy some dismembered yahoo pieces like flickr, babelfish, etc
4. those companies pays more returns than microsoft in 5yrs.
6. everyone criticizes him for not being able to see ahead and costing the investors money in the long run.
Oh sorry, it's just you who can see the future?
...only icahn and pension funds wants companies sold to microsoft. I know I don't. Then you can argue that it's yahoo... so what, those people invested in yahoo. bet they feel the same as i feel for companies i'm investing.
Yang already tried the CEO role a couple of times. He was generally regarded as ineffective. He also sat on the board of Alibaba when the Alipay scandal went down. I don't honestly think he's where to look for the future of Yahoo. I'm not sure that he has a real vision for Yahoo.
Yahoo's issue is that they have no overall direction. They have some great assets in terms of employees as well as online properties. But what exactly does Yahoo do? They aren't a search engine. They aren't really a news site. They talk a lot about mobile, but don't seem to have a meaningful presence. They talk about local, but I'm not even sure what that means, and in any case they don't actually seem to be doing anything meaningful there. (You can't claim to be "local" and have such broken maps.) They seem mostly to be an advertising company, but they don't really identify as such.
They need to figure out what it is that they do, or at least what they want to do, and pursue that aggressively. Otherwise I fear they'll continue on their aimless path.
It's been described as listless and without vision or a clear direction for several years now. Particularly with more macro economic trends, now is a good time for CEOs and business owners to re-engage themselves and their teams with the original vision or intent of their business, to help confirm a new vision moving forward.
I've just never felt that Yahoo! had that baton handed to them by the original founders (I even had to search for their names - Jerry Yang and David Filo). Plenty of companies grow to enormous success without the founder having to drive it, of course, but there's usually some connection that links the CEO to the company's founding principles. Yang is still on the Board I believe - can anyone point me to where his thoughts on the direction might have been shared?