Maybe I’m missing something, but I’m seeing some inconsistencies in the way the press interprets the recent events at Yahoo!
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Shares of Yahoo Inc fell more than 3 percent on Friday as reports of a brain drain raised fresh worries about the future of the Web company
Simultaneously, there has been lots in the press about Jerry Yang not being the right guy for the CEO job (see here).
So while on one hand Yang is being ripped for having gotten the company where it is, there is all this worry, concern, and disappointment about other high level execs leaving.
Yang didn’t get there on his own. The three big execs that announced their departure prompting the stock dip and mouth-foaming are Brad Garlinghouse, Vish Makhijani, and Qi Lu. Yeah, Garlinghouse wrote the peanut butter manifesto and we love him for it (I really do think Garlinghouse would have rocked as CEO and certainly could have done a better job than Weiner at whatever that guy did… more on that later)… but he’s also the guy in charge of Yahoo! Mail. Yeah, the same mail product that had a big launch party on Yahoo’s campus and then failed to actually deliver the new version to it’s own employees until months later. Let’s not forget it still sucks ass.
Makhijani was involved with search. Oh you mean that thing where Yahoo! keeps getting shit on for not having enough market share?
Qi Lu, who is a brilliant guy to be sure, was the head engineer of the Panama project. Though I’ll reiterate that I’ve seen Qi speak and he is indeed a very smart guy, and that his employees have great things to say about him, we were all around for what happened with Panama.
So why do the execs below CEO get a free pass? Yahoo! gets shit for not having enough market share in search, but the guy in charge of search leaving is considered a huge loss. Yahoo! mail continues to lose users to Google and be a bloated in-browser version of Outlook, but Garlinghouse leaving is a tragedy. Panama is largely irrelevant (the latest coverage to be found online is from 2006), but Qi Lu is part of the “brain drain.”
Don’t even get me started on Jeff Weiner who left earlier in the week. The guy who would write our mission statement, then revise it the next quarter because Google will have stomped our ass at whatever it was our mission statement was before. Not to mention the mission statements were fucktarded. Happy trails!
What I’m getting at is, Yang shouldn’t take all the blame. The state of the company is a reflection on ALL of the executives, not just Jerry. Though all of the guys recently leaving are bright talented people who have done great things (especially Joshua and Stewart, but not Weiner), you also can’t just blame the company’s fortunes on that one guy. All of the execs should get the blame, thus their departure shouldn’t cause such a backlash…
… unless you see what’s really happening: the press simply needs to shut the fuck up, as I have said before. Yahoo! isn’t doing as bad as they make it sound. The reason the stock holders are worried is because those three guys ARE good. Yahoo! does have a 20% market share in search (Miakhjiani is immediately hired by Yandex, a huge Russian search engine, proving my point that 20% market share ain’t nothing to fuck with). Yahoo! does grow at something like 7-8% a year (and our friend Michael Arrington should know from his econ classes that anything that grows faster than the GDP is overachieving). There is a lot to lose here, there are many ways in which Yahoo! is actually a great company that is incredibly successful, and now that might change. Yahoo! had, in my opinion, slowly started to turn it around before Microsoft came and just fucked everything up. Note that even amidst the obnoxious takeover battle, Yahoo! posted an awesome quarter.
This is all very messy, but what sucks is that all these smart people are probably leaving because they are tired of reading shit about their company in the press. The place is too big for a quick turn around, and after the exhausting msft ordeal, the end of the tunnel seems far away.
Hopefully this “brain drain” won’t result in an influx of dolts, and young, smart, driven people will seize on the opening these departures create to take over and make Yahoo! awesome again. But please, no more mission statements.
