Posts Tagged ‘Jerry Yang’

New Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz hasn’t even made public her plans for restructuring the company, but whatever they are, they’ll have to make do without Marco Boerries. In her AllThingsD column, Kara Swisher said that Boerries, who heads up Yahoo’s Connected Life business, is leaving the company.

In a post on Monday, Swisher discussed which executives would likely be gone with the restructuring; she included Boerries, who was a loyal supporter of ex-CEO Jerry Yang, on the list. Guess that’s a moot point now.

Boerries reportedly used the ever-popular “personal issues” as his reason for leaving in an e-mail he sent to some of his workers.

That’s Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang (well, his back anyway) in the NBC booth. He had his cell phone clutched to his ear. So if there’s any deal news in the next 24 hours, now you know what he was talking about.

Inside sources confided to our partner blog FishbowlLA in an exclusive that Yahoo!, via an email from departing CEO Jerry Yang, told its California employees that on Wednesday, as many as 1,500 employees will be laid off.

One employee who read the e-mail said Yang talked about the need to make cutbacks. “This was in keeping with his statement in mid-November that Yahoo! would have to layoff as much as 10% of its global workforce. He targeted Dec. 10 as D-Day for these employees,” the article said.

The report also said that human resources will likely take the biggest hit because their expenses are cost-based and most of their costs are staff.

Internet exec Ross Levinsohn has called a recent Times of London report that Microsoft and Yahoo signed a $20 billion deal for the latter’s search business “total fiction,” according to AllThingsD.

The article said that the other key players, including Microsoft and Yahoo reps, all backed up that comment, for numerous reasons: first, no one is talking, according to both companies. But more than that, Yahoo’s current total market cap is around $16 billion, so why Microsoft would pay $20 billion for just a piece of the company is beyond comprehension.

None of this means that a deal still won’t go down in the future, despite what Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says to the contrary, and despite the fact that Jerry Yang is finally leaving.

IDC said in a report released Wednesday on Jerry Yang‘s resignation as Yahoo CEO that mobile advertising needs to be a strategic focus for the venerable Web portal, according to MediaPost. “It is now that future market shares and mobile media brands are being created, yet Yahoo is falling behind Google,” said the report.

In addition, IDC recommends that Yahoo doesn’t need a branded phone or new mobile operating system like Android, but that they should instead focus on improving their existing Yahoo Go platform. “Even the new Go 3.0 still renders many standard Web pages hardly usable, lacks email attachments, instant messaging support, access to Yahoo Calendar, and direct access to Yahoo Contacts,” according to the report.

The fact is, mobile needs to be a key focus for every major online company. With 250 million active subscriptions in the U.S. alone—over 80 percent of the population—nearly everyone is already carrying a cell phone. And nearly all of the latest models are media capable. Yahoo already knows this; they’ve been in the mobile space for several years. They just need to kick it up a notch; their mobile platform suffers from the same lack of focus and multiple, vaguely-defined efforts as their desktop Web platform.

Now that Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang is out, GigaOM‘s Om Malik has a piece on what the portal should and shouldn’t do next.

“Yang’s decision to move on isn’t a surprise—it was clear from his talk at a recent industry conference that he was tired and perhaps a little out of his depth,” Malik writes. “His choice to head the company that was looking down a deep abyss a while back was an ineffectual one, and a total and absolute failure on the part of Yahoo’s board of directors.”

Malik writes that Yahoo shouldn’t sell out to Microsoft at today’s prices, although $20 per share would be more reasonable. He also thinks they should hire a CEO from another company instead of promoting from within, since it’s pretty clear that they need some new blood after all this.

More significantly, he writes that the company should focus on Yahoo News, Yahoo Sports, My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Flickr, Yahoo Messenger and Yahoo Search, as well as Yahoo’s e-commerce platform and particularly its mobile offerings, “for this is one area where its independence can help it win friends amongst [wireless carriers] who are worried about Google, Microsoft and Apple,” he said.

AllThingsD has confirmed that Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang will be stepping down from his post, ending months of speculation and calls for his resignation, effective as soon as the company finds a replacement.

From the release:

“Yahoo! Inc. today announced that its Board of Directors has initiated a search for a new Chief Executive Officer. Jerry Yang, co-Founder of Yahoo!, has decided to return to his former role as Chief Yahoo! upon the appointment of his successor as CEO, and he will also continue to serve on the Board. Yang, 40, assumed the CEO role at the Board’s request in June 2007, and he has led Yahoo! through a strategic repositioning and transformation of its platform.”

Read Yang’s classy memo to company employees.

Read the full release.

The Economist has a thoughtful piece on why it’s time for Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang to exit stage left—on his own. While none of us will ever be sure if the collapse of the Microsoft-Yahoo deal was entirely Yang’s fault, or if both sides were involved—the article refuses to cast blame—it points out that Yang still hasn’t offered a clear alternative to the Microsoft takeover.

“[Yang] went back to his friends at Google, who obliged by offering an advertising alliance that might have given Yahoo! some extra cashflow to tide it over a restructuring,” the report said. “The drawback was that the deal would have had Google, already the dominant power in search advertising, placing its ads next to Yahoo!’s searches in America. Trustbusters were suspicious, even when Google offered to make concessions. That is why Google, thinking of its long-term antitrust strategy, abandoned the deal on November 5th, shortly before Mr Yang took to the stage.”

Now what? Yang seems to be a very nice guy who deserves tremendous credit for launching an Internet empire. But even today, he still maintains that Yahoo’s strategy is to be a “starting point” for half a billion web surfers—which is something that’s increasingly occurring on mobile devices as well. “But how is that different from the old ‘portal’ idea which stopped working long ago, or the search box that Google in effect controls?” the article asked. The clock is running down…

It’s tempting for most people to blame Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang for the company’s recent stumbles, particularly his hard-nosed rejection (twice) of Microsoft’s rather generous $47.5 billion buyout offer—especially now that Yahoo’s stock is in a death spiral. But as Kara Swisher writes on AllThingsD, maybe the blame isn’t so clear-cut.

“Because, to my mind, if there is anyone to cast stones at in the ongoing crisis at Yahoo, BoomTown would have to toss a large boulder in the direction of the company’s incredibly shrinking board,” Swisher writes, since they’re the ones who are charged with keeping Yahoo on track. “That’s why their apparent stasis is just astonishing, if it were not quite so appalling.”

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Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer said last night while in Australia that a Yahoo acquisition is no longer under consideration—and that’s no matter what Jerry Yang may be saying to the press.

VentureBeat reports that Yahoo’s stock price has plummeted another 15 percent today, as reports of the “non-news” circulated around after rumors earlier in the week that the two companies were in fact talking again.

“Look, we made an offer, we made another offer,” Ballmer said yesterday at the Committee for Economic Development of Australia in Sydney. “It was clear that Yahoo didn’t want to sell the business to us, and we moved on… We tried at one point to do a partnership around search, not advertising. That didn’t work either, so we moved on, and they moved on.

“We are not interested in going back and re-looking at an acquisition,” he said. “I don’t know why they would be either, frankly.”