Vacancy indeed!
Photo credit — Julie Blaustein
Yahoo announced today the resignation of cofounder and CEO Jerry Yang. Yang’s resignation extends to all other positions he holds that are Yahoo-related — that includes Yahoo Japan Corp. and Alibaba Group Holdings — and it’s effective immediately.
The announcement details and Yahoo’s official statement are at http://investor.yahoo.net/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=640322
After the news of Yang’s exit, Yahoo’s stuck flew up five percent. Typically, Wall Street reacts well to change — especially at the upper echelons of a troubled company.
Yang founded the company with David Filo in January, 1994, initially as a Web portal and directory of sites. They originally named the site “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web” but changed it to Yahoo, an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.”
Reactions from:
SEO expert Danny Sullivan.
Forbes: “Will Jerry Yang’s Resignation Finally Shake Up Yahoo?” and “Yahoo: Jerry Yang Resigns; A Sign That A Deal Is Near?”
Your reactions? Reflections? Expectations for the future of Yahoo?
Is this ‘good for tribe’?
Share your thoughts below…!
I know this is considered to be a big story in the Valley, but I just don’t understand why anyone cares at this point. Yahoo has been all but irrelevant for as long as I can remember. Forget Yang, Yahoo in its entirety could have disappeared ten years ago and no one would be able to tell the difference. They lost whatever edge they had sometime in the late 90’s and have never shown any signs of regaining it.
If I recall, Yahoo is still the largest site on the web, when you consider all of their sub-properties. If not largest, then at least one of. I think they matter, though they’re no longer exciting.
@jeremy I hear what you’re saying. I suppose that some of their numbers are even going up. (For instance, millions of Kindle Fire users are probably trying the Yahoo Mail client since they can’t install a Gmail client app…) But for the most part, I think Yahoo is in the same position as AOL was 10 years ago–the majority of its user base just doesn’t know any better or they wouldn’t be members of that club.
I shouldn’t have been so broad in my condemnation though. Loss of their Fantasy Basketball leagues would be a serious bummer for me. And YSlow is a terrific tool for development (although if I had to I could get most of the same functionality out of Google PageSpeed). I know a lot of people like Yahoo Finance too.
But that’s about it as far as I can see. Yahoo has missed the boat on almost every new trend in development and functionality and revenue generation since the turn of the century, and their old standards — search, mail, etc. — pale in comparison to the competition. I haven’t voluntarily opened my Yahoo Mail inbox in five years, or voluntarily used Yahoo search in at least ten years, and I can’t imagine an scenario that would change that.