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Jerry Yang, co-founder and CEO of Yahoo has been constantly under attack by shareholders, Carl Icahn and now the latest entry in the list is ‘The New York Times’. Joe Nocera of The New York Times sent a public memo to Jerry saying “Oh Jerry, It’s No Longer Your Babyâ€?. The memo reads:
You can say all you want about how you were trying to protect employees with this plan. You were really trying to protect yourself. Rushed through by the board while you were supposedly negotiating with Microsoft in good faith, it actually encourages Yahoo employees to quit after a takeover, by guaranteeing them a financial windfall that Microsoft would have to pay. And since it cannot be upended even if the board is ousted, or the company is taken over, it also discourages anyone from trying to take over Yahoo.
A lot of people were unhappy with the deal not taking place but in the mean time there were people at Microsoft not happy with the deal taking place and Steve Ballmer knew it. The memo further says:
Jerry, you’re a billionaire because people all over the world bought your stock, and trusted you to do right by them. That’s the compact you make when you take a company public: you get to be really rich, but in return, you have an obligation to do everything you can to ensure that shareholders get a healthy return on their investment. It doesn’t matter that you would like Yahoo to remain independent, or that you can’t stand Microsoft. Your feelings aren’t supposed to get in the way of your fiduciary duty.
With everyone lashing out at Jerry for quite sometime, the Yahoo CEO came back strongly with an explanation. He appeared as a guest blogger on Steve Jobs’ site (The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs which now has Jerry Yang’s name added).
In the blog he admitted that Yahoo has lost the first great battle of Internet era. He seemed really frustrated as he says:
Look, I would never admit this to anyone in public, but the truth is that our deal with Google marks the end of the first great battle of the Internet era — call it Internet 1.0 — and we’ve lost. That’s what it means. We’ve capitulated. We’ve surrendered. We’re dead. We’re over. We’re roadkill. We’re AltaVista. We’re Lycos. We’ve admitted we can’t survive on our own and have turned to our biggest enemy to save us. When they write the history of the Internet, Yahoo! might be more than a footnote, but not much more.
Can you ever expected words like capitulated, surrendered, dead, we’re over, roadkill, etc from a man of this caliber? This only tells me how frustrated he is with the company’s performance. He criticised everyone from PR people to Sergey & Larry to Ballmer. He also evaluated his own performance bye saying:
As for me and my performance as a CEO, what can I say? Just because I started a company doesn’t mean I know how to run one. Think about it. I’m an electrical engineer, for Christ’s sake. What I know about management could fill a thimble. Same for negotiating. Which is how we ended up being pwned by Google. But as I keep telling my board: At least we won’t be working for Microsoft.
If he would have realised this at the right time and have taken necessary steps, things would have been much better. Also he pointed out the big flaw he had as a leader:
my big flaw as a leader is that I hate confrontation.
He also described how arrogant and unprofessional Ballmer, Larry and Sergey are (I would rather call them ill-professionals). Though he didn’t discuss Carl Icahn (did he forget him?).
After reading this post, I’ve realised that its not going to be a one way traffic anymore, Jerry is going to raise his voice. I think he should have confronted people when things started getting wrong. The reason why he is so frustrated is all because he never raised his voice when others were imposing their wrong ideas. Now when he is so frustrated, he is confronting them at some level. A lot of people think that Jerry is responsible for everything wrong happening at Yahoo but lets see how many secrets Jerry unveils to prove his innocence.
