Is Yang right to run Yahoo?
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Blog: Jerry Yang is Yahoo's new CEO. Is he the right choice for leader?
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Newly elevated Yahoo President Susan Decker issued a memo to employees detailing another massive organization for her company, which for the third time in a mere nine months realigns its business operations under reappointed leadership. Gone is the executive said to have spearheaded the takeover of ad market broker Right Media last April, and the fate of one of the company's most outspoken senior VPs appears uncertain.
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Yahoo&#39;s Chairman Roy Bostock is leading a group of the company&#39;s board members in favor of accepting&#160;Microsoft&#39;s unsolicited $44.6 billion takeover bid,&#160;according to a new report.The informal group headed by Bostock also includes other board members and billionaire investor Ron Burkle, according to the report in the New York Post, which quoted unnamed sources close to the situation. Board members Eric Hippeau, a managing partner at Softbank Capital, and Robert Kotick, CEO of Activision Publishing, are standing behind Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, who does not want to accept Microsoft&#39;s offer.On Monday,&#160;Yahoo&#39;s board rejected Microsoft&#39;s offer,&#160;saying it undervalued the company.According to the Post, the discord revolves around Yang and his followers who are so opposed to selling the company to Microsoft that Bostock and his group fear they will act out of emotions rather than their fiduciary duty to Yahoo shareholders. Such an action could expose the board to lawsuits by shareholders.Yang sent a letter to shareholders&#160;Wednesday night, saying that Microsoft&#39;s bid substantially undervalues the company and that Yahoo is positioned to take advantage of growth in the online advertising market.Yahoo could not be reached for comment.Computerworld is an InfoWorld affililate.
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Yahoo chief executive Jerry Yang sent a message to employees on Wednesday, assuring them the firm's leaders are exploring ways to avoid a takeover by software giant Microsoft.
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Struggling Internet giant Yahoo brought back co-founder Jerry Yang as chief executive Monday to replace Terry Semel as the company girds up to fight back the Google juggernaut.
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(InfoWorld) - Terry Semel ended his six-year run as Yahoo's CEO on Monday, and the company's co-founder Jerry Yang will take over from him, the company said. Semel has been the focus of intense criticism in the past two years due to Yahoo's inability to capitalize as much as expected on the fast-growing market for search engine advertising. By contrast, Google has enjoyed eye-popping revenue growth and enviable profits almost exclusively from the search advertising market. Last week, at Yahoo's annual shareholder meeting, Semel fielded stinging criticism from shareholders in attendance, leading to tense exchanges at times. Semel resigned from his position as CEO and chairman and will become the role of non-executive chairman and serve as advisor to the management team. Semel became chairman and CEO in May 2001. The board of directors appointed Yang, who cofounded the company 12 years ago, as CEO, and Susan Decker, former executive vice president and head of Advertiser and Publisher Group, as the company's president. In a webcast, Semel said he had told the board that he wanted to step back from his executive role "sooner rather than later" and that he and the board agreed this would be a good time for him to step down as CEO. "I've long been talking to the board about the importance of ensuring a smooth succession to Yahoo's senior leadership," Semel said. Semel expressed full confidence that Yang and Decker are the right people to carry Yahoo "through its multiyear transformation" while acknowledging that the past year has been a difficult one for Yahoo and that no one in Yahoo's management has been satisfied with the company's performance. (More to follow.)
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Microsoft has offered to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion -- but how did a company that started so small come to be worth so much? That's a story that began in the early days of the World Wide Web, when people were struggling to keep track of the new world of multimedia it offered them.In those days people viewed the Web through NCSA Mosaic, a browser that helped popularize the Web; they could check the level of coffee in the Trojan Room coffee machine at Cambridge University using the first Web cam on the Internet, and they could read the headlines on the NandO Times, one of the first "new media" operations.Yahoo first appeared on the Internet in 1994 when Jerry Yang and David Filo were still at Stanford University -- something that was immediately obvious from the site's first address: http://akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo/. It wasn't until later in 1994 that the easier-to-type http://www.yahoo.com came along, but even then it redirected to the Stanford server.But back in 1994 people weren't that concerned about clunky addresses. They'd been living with the text-based Internet for years and the Web with all of its richness had people hooked. Yahoo stepped in to solve an early problem: how could users keep track of the fast expanding World Wide Web.What Yang and Filo built was revolutionary for the time: a hierarchical index of the Web divided into subjects like "computers," "government" and "society and culture." (The service lives on today as the Yahoo Directory)Love at first sightFrom the early days it was clear that users loved Yahoo."David Filo and Jerry Yang should be given a Medal of Honor, then locked in a room and never allowed to get lives: they are already doing an excellent job of categorizing the Web with Yahoo's Hostlist," wrote one user in response to a Sept. 1994 Usenet posting asking for a directory of Web sites.Word of the service spread through the Internet, often from enthusiastic users passing on details of the resource, but sometimes with a little promotion by Yang and Filo themselves."We have a pretty comprehensive listing at the Yahoo Database," wrote Yang on Usenet in Sept. 1994. "It's an attempt to be organized by subject (although not very well) -- but we are working on it. Searchable too," he wrote.All the time Yang and Filo continued to live everyday lives, unaware they would become billionaires in less than a decade. A look at old Usenet postings reveals Yang campaigning for fair funding for college students while Filo was trying to trade World Cup tickets online.As 1995 began, Yahoo was serving up 200,000 pages per day from its index of about 25,000 Web sites, and was about to hit the big time. During that year Yang published a book about Yahoo and earned an interview on National Public Radio's Fresh Air. Both cofounders appeared on a PBS Frontline TV documentary about the Internet called "High Stakes in Cyberspace.""What Yahoo does is make your wasting your time easier. It wants you to get where you want to go to waste time faster so you don't have to waste time wasting time," is how Yang explained Yahoo in the documentary, according to a transcript of the show.The publicity came just as thousands of people started piling onto the Web and new sites were popping up faster and faster. As a result by the middle of June 1996 Yahoo had jumped to 9 million pages per day and in the third quarter of that year traffic for the three-month period hit 1 billion page views.Investment in the popular and fast growing site wasn't far behind its rising popularity. In April 1995 Sequoia Capital provided Yahoo with two rounds of venture funding just as Yang and Filo decided to put their studies on hold and start running Yahoo full time."We [hadn't] done anything on our research in the last few months," Filo told CIO magazine in a June 1995 interview. "We had to decide which thing to pursue, and we're not really interested in what our PhDs were in."An initial public offering and international expansion was next on the cards, and by the end of 1996 Yahoo had sites in the U.K., Germany, France, and Japan, and had launched the Yahooligans service for kids.Early competitionYahoo wasn't without competition back in those days. WebCrawler was getting popular and Lycos was also making a name for itself, but none of the search engines at the time fully satisfied people. So it was common to switch allegiances whenever a better service came along. In 1996 many Internet users did just that when sites like Inktomi and Digital Equipment's Altavista launched.But Yahoo managed to endure the competition, possibly because its directory often was a better place to find links that the early search engines.Microsoft was making a late start on the Internet, launching MSN as a dial-up Internet access service in the U.S. in 1995. It wasn't until a few years later that MSN was relaunched as a portal and still more years until Microsoft put its full weight behind developing Internet-based products and services.Like Yahoo, Google also grew out of Stanford University but didn't start to achieve recognition until the end of the decade. Within a few years, however, it had grown to become the leader in online search.Today Yahoo is one of the most powerful online media brands in the world. It has more than 500 million users in numerous countries and its name is recognizable to billions of people.
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It looks like an unlikely collaboration. Adobe rules in desktop publishing and imaging applications while Yahoo! was once the king of online search.
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SUNNYVALE, California  - Yahoo Inc. YHOO.O is   set to allow outsiders to create new services using the world's   most popular consumer e-mail program, in the broadest move the   Web has yet seen to enlist independent programmers to build a   company's products for it.
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Yahoo Inc's Jerry Yang will seek on Monday to demonstrate in his first major speech since taking over as chief executive in June the inroads the company is making putting Web services on mobile phones.
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Bleeding market share, managerial talent and investor confidence, Internet giant Yahoo on Monday replaced chief executive Terry Semel with company co-founder Jerry Yang.
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Following investor pressure for a management shake-up, Yahoo Inc. Chairman and Chief Executive Terry Semel is stepping aside and will be replaced as CEO by co-founder Jerry Yang, Yahoo said on Monday, sending shares up 3.5 percent in extended trade.
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Yes, there's still money to spend Yahoo!'s first quarter financial results may have been a tad disappointing, but that hasn't stopped Jerry Yang and the gang from acquiring a hefty stake in Indian internet advertising company Tyroo Media. The move comes less than a week after Yahoo! finalized its purchase of U.S.-based ad firm RightMedia, part of an ongoing battle with Google and Microsoft over online ad dollars.â¦
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Yahoo Inc. Chairman Terry Semel ended his six-year tenure as chief executive officer Monday and will hand over the reins to co-founder Jerry Yang in the Internet icon's latest attempt to regain investor confidence. Semel, 64, will remain chairmain in a non-executive role.
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Yahoo Inc. on Monday tapped  co-founder Jerry Yang to replace Chief Executive Terry Semel,  bowing to investor pressure as the Internet media company has  failed to keep up with rival Google Inc..
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Mike Arrington is doing a great job of laying out the options for Yahoo wrt Microsoft's offer to buy them out. He's written two pieces that helped put it together for me. Mike clearly has great sources in the investment banking community and among potential buyers of Yahoo, and is actively talking with them. He's got a business lawyer's mind and, as you know I'm sure, he's spent the last few years immersed in web applications.  Bottom-line: Yahoo's three choices are: 1. Tough it out alone. 2. Sell advertising rights to Google. 3. Accept Microsoft's offer.  Mike argues that option 1 would result in shareholder lawsuits and in the end would get Yahoo nowhere because they'd end up selling to Microsoft eventually. Option 2 would enable them to pay a major cash dividend to their shareholders, making up for the lost windfall coming from Microsoft's offer. Options 2 and 3 have the risk of being rejected by government regulators.  Now, as a member of Yahoo's developer community, and generally a respector of Yahoo (is that a word) -- I say take the deal. I don't think Yahoo has ever had leadership that has been up to navigating the treacherous waters of tech industry economics and politics. At least with the Microsoft acquisition they would get one -- Ray Ozzie. He's a guy you can sit across the table from and plot something out and he can deliver. I've had many good meetings with Yahoo people, but rarely have they resulted in action. From my own selfish point of view, Microsoft owning Yahoo might mean that Ray makes more trips to the Bay Area (figuratively) and when he sits down, we can talk about new open interfaces and developer programs for Yahoo properties. I've read most of the commentary on the Yahoo deal, and the other piece that made an impression was Mark Cuban's. He says that Yahoo should accept the Microsoft deal because it would give them the breathing room they need re Wall Street. He argues that the market has always allowed Microsoft to sink resources into developing markets, and that's exactly what Yahoo needs to become the organization that it has been trying to be. Instead, the market treats Yahoo as a comp to Google, but Yahoo doesn't have the economics of Google, so that's, long-term, a losing battle.  There's one more reason I think Yahoo should sell to Microsoft -- the fatigue of the people. The company has been wobbly too long. If they don't take the Microsoft offer it's going to be a long wobbly decline and the shareholders will be right to be angry. Here's their chance to get out, it's time, so just do it.
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Defending its actions in disclosing the identities of Chinese dissidents, Yahoo on Monday said it acted with Chinese law in doing so. The company has been roundly criticized for its involvement in several jailings.