UPDATED Back story: Did YHOO try to scoop WSJ? The reorganization is not finished...
By Tom Foremski - December 6, 2006
The timing of Yahoo's reorganization announcement signaled something else is going on. The time on the Businesswire release was 5.34pm Tuesday West Coast time. Usually such things are announced early the next day before the markets open, or early afternoon Pacific time, when markets have just closed.
Here's what happened. Yahoo prereleased it because the Wall Street Journal said it would go live with the story. The Wall Street Journal had been prepped by sources and agreed to publish the reorganization story in Wednesday's newspaper. But it wanted an interview with Terry Semel, Yahoo CEO, which he kept missing Tuesday afternoon.
WSJ editors grew increasingly concerned with no show from Terry Semel. They worried that Yahoo might be pre-briefing the rest of the universe and it might lose pole position on the story, so the Wall Street Journal told Yahoo it would go with what it had and publish the story online. Which prompted Yahoo to try to scoop the Wall Street Journal and get its version out first.
All I can say is that things have gotten very strange at Yahoo this year. This reorg is needed but the one that's needed is at the very top, IMHO.
Terry Semel was the right person for the job in May 2001 when he joined as CEO, he isn't now. It is clear to anyone that knows Yahoo, that this reorganization is not the final one.
Has Mr Semel been spending too much time at his home in SoCal? It seems that way because he is very much out of step with the culture of his company and his business.
One more reorg to go...get it done sooner than later.
- - -
Additional info:
Top Ten Candidates To Take Terry Semel's Job At Yahoo Financial News - Yahoo! Finance
[BTW: Susan Decker is my pick.]
Dan Farber writes about his former colleague Dan Rosensweig:
Yahoo’s Dan Rosensweig heading off for new adventures
Lately Yahoo has seen an exodus of senior executives and the pubic airing of an internal memo, dubbed the Peanut Butter Manifesto, which suggested that Yahoo needs a more cohesive vision, clarity of ownership and accountability and decisiveness. The author of the memo, Yahoo senior vice president Brad Garlinghouse, also said that Yahoo needs sell of non-core businesses and lay off 15 to 20 percent of staff. Dan said the leaked memo had nothing to do with the reorganization, which Semel also claimed in a blog post on Yahoo.
By Tom Foremski - December 6, 2006 | Permalink | Comment
| Category: Yahoo [YHOO]
| SVW Toolbar | SVW Newsletter | SVW Mobile
- NEW STORIES:
- Intel Experiment Could Save Millions in Data Center Power Costs
- Will East Coast Flood West Coast in Search of Jobs?
- GOOG Founders Could Buy All US Newspapers and Still Have $12bn
- Microsoft in Bay Area Recruiting Blog Sites for AdCenter Ad Network
- Silicon Valley Rocks! Charity Event for Local Schools
- Fishwrap: Changing Media and PR . . . Plus a Great Pep Talk
- Top of my 2008 Watch: Berlin Based Plista . . . and Online Dopplegangers
- The "Experiential Gap" . . . and the Growing Cosmos of Twitter Applications
- FT Anger on AIG Bailout
- Shift Happens . . . A Visit With One of My Favorite PR Companies
Comments (3)
Very interesting piece.
Just a question Tom, on the margin of the main issue here: do you really think Semel was the right guy back in May 2001? At the time I happened to have been covering Yahoo for Upside and remember the big push at the time was for 1> premium services that could be priced and sold to consumers and 2> better relations with big advertising accounts.
At the time it was already clear Google was a big threat. And yet Yahoo went in a very non-Google, old school media direction, and brought in old school media vet Semel.
In retrospect, free ad-supported services and very small advertising accounts (aka things like AdWords and AdSense) look like the key growth drivers, not so much premium services. (The obvious exception being music and video sales on iTunes.)
If Yahoo had gone with a tech exec instead of a media exec, would they be so far behind Google in contextual ads? Would Inktomi have been put to better use, or Panama have shipped on time? Would Gmail have done as much damage to Y! Mail?
At the time Semel came on it was the nadir of the burst bubble and advertising, search tech and other dot-com staples looked like the roads to failure. So Yahoo retreated. But maybe it should have, at that exact moment, attacked.
Posted: December 7, 2006 10:41 AM
Ryan, yes, I did think that Yahoo was doing the right thing appointing Semel because it was a realization that it is a media company, a technology-enabled media company.
However, I now believe that it was too early in that move, and you are dead right.
In hindsight, there was still way too much money left on the table that could have been had by harnessing technology led initiatives rather than using less-scalable media professionals.
Let's remember that GOOG licensed some of its text-ad technology from YHOO(!)
PC World - Yahoo Licenses Technology to Google
Posted: December 8, 2006 4:55 PM
Good points Tom, and that last nugget is a huge surprise to me.
Posted: December 9, 2006 12:02 PM