enough of this shenanigans - his ousting is long over due

hard to sympathize with the guy when his compensation is so outrageous.

550million dollars. wow. another reason ceo pay should be linked to performance.

that is alot of pay, when you could fire (1) guy and buy (3+) startups. it is ridiculous.

- Rbowles

guess it depends on what would have happened otherwise from 2001-2006… would other CEOs have bought Google for $3-5B? would they have missed Overture / Inktomi? dunno, hard to say.

however, it’s clear they’ve underperformed the last few years compared to Google, probably even compared to other players in the market as well.

i’d grade him a ‘B’ from 2001-2004, but probably a ‘C’ or lower since then.

whether or not tech knowledge is required for a Yahoo CEO (i think so), from whatever measure you look at — search market share, earnings, stock price — they’re clearly not measuring up.

Terry might not be to blame, but change is certainly in order.

if the Chargers can go 14-2 and still decide to fire Schottenheim, Yahoo’s board should be at least as brave…

It’s interesting to see how difficult has been for Yahoo to take a “legacy platform” and transform it into Panama. I’m sure there have been lots of challenges but it’s hard to believe it’s taken Yahoo this long to do it. I’m really looking forward to it. It’d better kick ass!

Mike:

Thanks for the mention of our “Plan B” Group appearing on Seeking Alpha.

The original post is here: http://breakoutperformance.blo.....today.html

Also, your readers might be interested in commenting on our unofficial Yahoo! wiki here: http://yahoo.wikia.com/wiki/Talk:Yahoo_Plan_B .

Cheers,

Eric

We are lucky to live in a world where Yahoo did not buy Google early on.

What incentive is there to do better when you already are making $110 million a year ???

Since Yahoo didn’t buy Google, could you imagine if Google bought Yahoo? That would give Google the internet and Microsoft would be out of the game completely instead of being a minor player. I would like to see that happen actually. Forget about Microsoft buying Yahoo, that would be a disaster. Yahoo should be smart and sell to Google and be a powerhouse of untold size and influence. At least that way Yahoo would still be around in 5-10 years. If they sell to Microsoft, their ineptitude in search, lack of vision and inevitable delays would be the death of Yahoo then Microsoft on the internet, again giving Google full control.

Interesting link about his pay…says he (only) makes 600k a year in salary. The rest is stock.

http://www.forbes.com/static/pvp2005/LIRXC25.html

Umm lets not group MySpace and YouTube is the same category. MySpace has proven its worth many times over. The jury is still out on YouTube.

The original post is here: http://breakoutperformance.blo.....today.html

It’s possible to comment on the unofficial Yahoo wiki here: http://yahoo.wikia.com/wiki/Talk:Yahoo_Plan_B

i dont really see what google would get by buying yahoo - from every indication, except for a few exceptions like the pipes/fake teams, google already has all the better talent. all the stories i hear about perl and php scripts running inside yahoo. not to mention the flickr outages, and the like. really points to yahoo’s internal operations being as incompetent as their growth compared to google.

the only argument for that would be to buy whatever big properties yahoo has, to own the entire internet..not for the company itself. . but this is oldstyle AOL-buys-spinner or Netscape nonsense imo - who uses spinner anymore or has their homepage set to netscape.com?

sheesh the $35 Million they paid fer Flickr is pocket change to Semel*

thass not even weekly allowance thass less than Lunch money or even ShoeMoney!!

;))

i agree with the comments that hopefully Google will buy Yahoo! over Micropoop*

Google were the ones that Freed all of us from that evil empire shoving crappy software down our throats year after year & for that i am forever grateful*

i do admire Yahoo’s Web2.0 acquisitions & am interested in seeing what Caterina Fake of Flickr fame will be cooking up in the Brickworks division of Yahoo!

;))

Just think. Yahoo paid for $6.6 billion for Broadcast.com which is all but in the trash can and they passed up $3 billion for Google?

Hindsight is 20/20 on MySpace. That site is a piece of crap but Google is a real sustainable business. News Corp. flat out got lucky with buying MySpace.

The 3 billion figure is a myth. Google guys never wanted to sell, and only came up with that figure to see how Yahoo perceived them.

I don’t think there was a single Yahoo employee who would have endorsed a MySpace purchase. GeoCities is bad enough.

The one biggest mistake was hiring Lloyd Braun from ABC. I didn’t get that at all. #2 mistake was not utilizing Flash on the presentation layer. (They were more Java / Ajax.) Flash is the only browser add-on with a security sandbox and widespread adoption.

Would Terry get a home depot type exit package?

Ill vouch on my experience that the earnings for Yahoo should be up this quarter based on Panama. The new system has doubled many clients spend while conversions are all over the place. Established overture campaigns that were producing steady leads/sales at x over the past 2 years are now producing the same leads at 2x.

I know my experience is a limited one but reading many forums over at webmasterworld and managing 10+ clients ppc accounts it seems like Yahoo will have a stellar quarter.

I cant imagine Yahoo buying Google, what a different world we would live in if that happened.

No single person… past, present or future is worth $550 million over 5 years…. or 50 for that matter.

“Google were the ones that Freed all of us from that evil empire shoving crappy software down our throats year after year & for that i am forever grateful*”

for all the posing google does….they still haven’t delivered a decent spreadsheet software that works….or maybe we should use their search engine instead of microsoft word now…..

its a matter of time before the same people that hate microsoft….start calling Google evil….it’s all about profits yo!! no one is in the business for charity….

i think terry has to stay to fix the disaster yahoo! is in.. they need a strong leadership person therefore he is the right guy and i guess he is now awake .. … he was fired at warner bros so i am sure that he is fighting hard, that this does not happen a 2nd time..

- he has to streamline the org
- more accountability to his managers
- improve international performance in particular in europe
- and work on global scale in everything they are doing.. and finally
- entering some new markets without lunching any entity..

this has been floating around for some time. first, to eric jackson: like with any company, if you don’t like the way the ship is going, sell your f#$%#$% shares and move on. these essays are exercises in futility, particularly when you won’t vote with your wallet and sell your f#$%#$% shares.

to his points:

1. compensation is an issue, and tech land abounds with ridiculous payouts to execs. the only way this will be fixed is if shareholders SELL THEIR F#$%#$% SHARES and make their intentions clear (starting to see a trend here?)

2. the LA campus for the media group was a major boondoggle and waste of time. the amount of shuttling done by yahoo between southern and northern cal is keeping southwest airlines in the green. agreed that the southern cal campus should just be erased, but then again, this is a minor issue at this point.

3. failing to buy youtube and myspace….not sure. youtube is strategic, myspace will be a ghost town in five years (like facebook). how much money are you going to plonk down for a nightclub? the churn in social is going to be unreal, we are already seeing it, i don’t fault yahoo for not getting in a bidding war for these sites. youtube is another issue, that was a f%#$up, it will be strategic for google.

4. org chart issues…yahoo is taking care of these now. by 2008 the reorg should be “done”.

Whoopee: Stock is up 16% since this campaign started Jan. 7th. I’m not selling. In fact, I just nominated myself for the board. I’m in YHOO for the long-term. Eric

I wouldn’t put all the blame on the CEO. Besides, Yahoo! isn’t failing. It just isn’t as successful as astounding Google…

i think the criticism is way to hard … IMHO he relied to long on Dan R (COO) and Dan´s gang bang at yahoo!. this problem he already fixed with Dan´s departure , i guess the next issue will be fixed in Europe’s management and later on … with panama on track and a solid growth in branded Terry will be successful back on track in Q3 / Q4 and a stock price around 42 $.
i bet on that.

with that kind of money I would research and learn and become the Ceo of Yahoo!:)

I don’t know much about Semel, but I do know this: Yahoo! needs to return to its roots. I think it was a silly idea to try and transform Yahoo! into a media company. Who the hell were they fooling? Yahoo! became popular for developing a solution to navigating the web. Why bring in a TV guy to run a search engine?

So, what should Yahoo! do?

1. Find an insider who understands Yahoo!’s culture and the business of search

2. Sell off some non-core assets and re-invest the proceeds into R&D

3. Did I mention returning to basics?

No, folks, I am not an “expert” on business strategy. I’m not an “expert” in anything. I don’t claim to know anything like so many other “experts” in this industry and others (and, contrary to popular belief, most “experts” are full of their own shit). However, common sense, is well, common sense. I seem to have done quite well with it, coupled with some great knowledge, tenacity, patience and luck all mixed in together.

And for crying out loud, GET RID of Yahoo! Photos and other services where things overlap. Why the hell does anyone need two photo sites when you’ve got the world’s MOST popular and KICK ASS photo sharing property (umm, Flickr?)

Ahhh, it’s just the American way to make changes when it’s far too late — it’s only then when our ignorance and arrogance fails us and we awaken to realize we need to do something. We do this shit everyday in society, business, relationships, ahhh … why bother going on.

Yahoo definitely missed some of the boat with the long delay of Panama…Pay per call or Pay per purchase advertising is the holy grail. Thats what will get the mom and pops businesses in the game and small business is the last frontier and last low hanging fruit in online spending.

Whichever of the big three can pull this off will be the big winner…as I see it right now Google is in the lead. Put the whole shootin match (Panama, adwords, etc.)on the cell phone and combine it with gps and bada bing thats your killer online advertising platform. You gotta hold the customers hand right down to the register…hell even take out their wallets if ya can….then you cooking with gas!

Panama is an essential step for Yahoo! but is not the answer. It’s the ad network, not the ad tool that matters. Yes, an upgrade to the cumbersome Overture tool was necessary, but that doesn’t solve the real problem. PPC advertisers will invest more money with Yahoo! when it has an upgraded ad distribution network. This means improving the core Yahoo! Search product to take market share away from Google, increasing the adoption of YPN at the expense of AdSense, and reducing reliance on low quality partners like parked domains.

This quote from the article really rubbed me wrong:

Conclusion: Yahoo!’s board needs to immediately remove Mr. Semel – who is 64 – and begin a search process to find a new Chairman and CEO. This Chairman and CEO search should examine all qualified internal and external candidates.

What does Terry’s age have to do with it? Is it somehow an acceptable conclusion that because he’s 64 he’s no longer fit for the job? This is inexcusable age discrimination IMHO. It invalidates an otherwise well constructed argument why Mr. Semel’s performance is falling short (note, I’m just qualifying the argument as well constructed, not the conclusions).

You’re right Ryan pay per call and pay per purchase is the holy grail, but i don’t think any of the current “big three” will win out in this.

jubiil i think the criticism is way to hard

Not when you’re paid $100M a year. A drunk off the street could have run Yahoo as well as it has been over the last 5 years.

The fault doesn’t just lay with him, but with the board too. I wouldn’t be surprised if it came out several of them made a couple million a year for just approving whatever Terry wanted in compensation.

What’s baffling is that there is really no good reason for Yahoo! to still be so popular. They do a lot of different things, but don’t do any of them extremely well. They have so many users due to getting a headstart on signing up people for email, but other then that competitive advantage, I’m not sure why anyone visits Yahoo! when so many other services offer far superior functions and products.

Perhaps there are a lot of people who prefer one place/portal to do 90% of their web surfing and usage. However, as younger people grow in to a $$$ transactional age and their need for comprehensive enterprise solutions grows, Yahoo! will likely see a marked decline in dedicated usage.

I think Yahoo! has about 3 years to find something on the Net where they are the market leader. Otherwise, the hallows may be calling. As Jack Welch said, “If you aren’t first or second in a business, you’re wasting your time.” Tell me: what is Yahoo! first or second in right now? (And I don’t mean by default.)

How long till one of these engines purchase the somewhat struggling Discover Card and make it interesting?

Eric writes:

“In fact, I just nominated myself for the board.”

cool! i just nominated myself for a nobel prize in medicine

i think a little ass-kicking is cool, but i am closer to my nobel prize than you are to being on yahoo’s board

Agreed that they are major players in those realms. However, my contention is that those fields are profitable for Y! by default. In other words, the rest of rich-media is gaining quickly.

“What’s baffling is that there is really no good reason for Yahoo! to still be so popular. They do a lot of different things, but don’t do any of them extremely well. They have so many users due to getting a headstart on signing up people for email, but other then that competitive advantage, I’m not sure why anyone visits Yahoo! when so many other services offer far superior functions and products. ”

As Dave McClure stated in a previous post on his blog, the real problem with Yahoo has been that they haven’t been able to fully monetize their traffic. Despite that problem, Yahoo still has huge reach on a global scale & they have bought some companies recently that I think will make them a play long-term (Del.icio.us, Flickr,MyBlogLog, etc.) If I had to compare Yahoo and MSN relative to web plays, Yahoo beats them by a mile.

When I do something on the web, here’s what I do:
Search: Google
News: Yahoo
Email: Yahoo (one of my accounts)
Photos: Flickr
Sports: Yahoo
Finance: Yahoo
RSS: Yahoo

Google is an obvious presence in the search market, one I don’t see going away soon. But I do think it would be silly to count Yahoo out on the factors mentioned above & we shouldn’t forget that Yahoo has a large global presence relative to “branding”.

Perhaps Yahoo hasn’t entirely figured out what they are over the past few years & that’s the problem? A portal? A media outlet? A search engine? User-generated content? All of the above?

” I’m not sure why anyone visits Yahoo! when so many other services offer far superior functions and products. ”

Quick note: Having better features doesn’t always = user adoption. Products and features need to be digested by average users, not just those of us that work in the tech industry. A “better” product may not equate to simple.

Anybody else find it ironic that, thanks to Yahoo’s syndication arrangement with Seeking Alpha, this post shows up in Yahoo Finance?

http://biz.yahoo.com/seekingal.....38_id.html

Whoopee:

I hope to see you in Santa Clara on May 24 for the Yahoo annual meeting of shareholders. As of this morning, our group has over $62 million of Yahoo stock pledged towards this campaign. If we want things to change at yahoo — and it’s got to start at the board-level in order for things to change at the ceo-level — all yhoo shareholders should vote “withhold” for several key directors and “for” others. We’ll see what happens. And good luck on that nobel prize.

Jacob:

I’m certainly not an agist. Age is a state of mind. Sumner Redstone, Alan Greenspan, and Rupert Murdoch certainly don’t act like most 75+ year olds that I know. They are all — whether you agree with all their strategic moves or not — men of action. Terry Semel is not.

I do not object to the fact that he is 64; I object to his inaction. His inaction suggests that — given his age and given the litany of other facts you can examine in the sum total of his record — he is biding his time, waiting to leave.

Why should Yahoo! shareholders wait for him to finally deign to leave? Let’s bring in a 75 year old who takes some action — or any other qualified candidate — rather than continue on in this exhausting state of limbo.

For clarification, I’m not suggesting that Yahoo! offers poor services and products. My contention is that more and more players are coming to market that will offer better services in some of the niches Yahoo! has covered so far. I think that was kind of the point of the Peanut Butter memo - do fewer things, do them better.

It’s going to be hard to go to battle against Google when smaller, single-sector startups are nipping at their ankles.

$550 million?? so much for tying compensation to performance.

550 million is absolutely mind boggling, why work at all, why would you care what happens to yahoo, because of your work ethic? your position of power? because the internet needs you to help it grow? Go ahead call me shallow I would’nt lift a finger to do anything that smelled of work. I’d get the latest bionic body parts and jump over buildings n’ stuff, surf mavericks naked, date 5 super models at the same time, give a wee bit to charity, and get a neural wifi implant etc.

To back up magnusdopus above, and to reiterate that the $3 billion figure was never really an option, I’ll quote from a recent Wired article:

“The Yahoo CEO had offered to buy Google for roughly $3 billion, but the young Internet search firm wasn’t interested. Once upon a time, Google’s founders had come to Yahoo for an infusion of cash; now they were turning up their noses at what Semel believed was a perfectly reasonable offer. Worse, Semel’s lieutenants were telling him that, in fact, Google was probably worth at least $5 billion.”

What I’m saying is that Yahoo actually TRIED to buy Google for $3 billion, but Google wasn’t taking and Semel just wouldn’t go any higher. Quite frankly, even if he did, I doubt Google still would have sold.