As Yahoo! boss Jerry Yang hits out at his detractors, there's an interesting piece around today that asks the salient question: what is Yahoo!?
While Microsoft tries to resurrect its effort to buy some/all of Yahoo!, Yang was yesterday talking up his ability to save Yahoo! and slating the software giant.
"I think that I can bring stability back to Yahoo, and I want to get on with building company. I think that the destabilising by Microsoft has become more and more intentional. I am not happy about it."
He also hit out at investor Carl Icahn, who wants to replace the company's directors at the August 1 board meeting:
"To trust Mr. Icahn and his board is really a bad choice," Yang said.
Yang just does not sound or act like someone who is going to be there that long, which was kind of the point of John Gapper's piece in the FT today, which backs Icahn and Microsoft before tackling the seemingly tough question what is Yahoo!.
"From the start, Yahoo has been more of a Gestalt, or a shape, than a company. When pledging loyalty, executives talk of "bleeding purple", its signature colour. Microsoft makes software, Google does search, Facebook is a social network. Yahoo! is purple and has an exclamation mark.
"When asked at a Journal conference last month what Yahoo was, Mr Yang replied: 'We want you to start your day at Yahoo!'. You could equally say that of a shower."
It shouldn't be a tough question, but it is and, if Yang really doesn't know, then you have to ask what is the guy doing there?
Gapper thinks it might be a newspaper, personally that seems something of a round peg/square hold stretch. Yahoo! is a disorganised bunch of web pages and software tool that do not coherently hang together. It is neither one thing nor the other.
And as Gapper points out, Yang has never run a big company before (Tim Koogle and Terry Semel have been the two CEOs over the last 12 years), is not a technology pioneer (Yahoo! was always more of a media company in the early years taking advantage of the early web) and does not seem to possess the skills nor ideas to take the business coherently forward and maintain that wealth of traffic -- Yahoo! still pulls in 500m users.
"I agree with Mr Yang that Microsoft ought not to be allowed to grab hold of Yahoo!'s search assets, leaving the rest of the company even more inchoate. If Yahoo! is to be sold, let it be sold whole to any company that will take on the risk.
"But simply giving Mr Yang yet more time to work on Yahoo" does not strike me as an appealing outcome for shareholders. He has, after all, had 14 years on the job so far. That should have been time enough," Gapper says.
Gordon Macmillan
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