>Mark is very competitive… I’m guessing he’d much rather buy the Chicago Cubs and hope he can take the curse off of them. And let’s face it, if he did that and the Cubs won a World Series under his ownership, he’d be a way bigger hero than if he had the ability to make Yahoo actually truly competitive with Google.

Maybe in *your* eyes he would be a much bigger hero for turning around the Cubs, but anyone who could bring Yahoo! to it’s full glory (and kick Google’s ass to the curb forever) would be a much bigger hero in mine. It all depends on what you like, and believe me, I’m not a sports fan generally speaking, so I could give two craps about the Cubs.

Search engines, on the other hand, are my lifeline to the Web; how I find all my information; give me most of what I blog about, help me connect to other like-minded people, and help me figure out what’s going with my site and with other websites. They help me keep track of and to find everything.

Google is not a good search engine for the research and statistics I’m after. Neither is Yahoo!, but it’s really not much worse (nor that much different).

Considering how lousy *every* search engine’s results are (and how many thousands of indexable pages most of them exclude for *any* given search) I do alright with my searches most of the time. I can usually find a lot more with a Google search than anyone else I know, but I’ve spent years honing ways to do it. Most of my searches take too much damn time, just slogging through hundreds (sometimes thousands) of useless results to get to that one gem hidden away on a page that the search engines either didn’t have at all, or minimized (or practically hid) within their results.

If I spend that much time at it, and I think my techniques are pretty good, I can’t imagine what less experienced (and less hell-bent) people go through to find what they want or need. They see the ads, they see the top results, they see nothing matches what they need, so they leave the page…how is that providing the best search engine? It isn’t. Anyone who can improve Yahoo! will be like a God to me, I promise.

Oh, and thanks for the insight about Mark. I wasn’t basing my opinion on his coaching, though, but rather on his reaction to Google allowing clips from his movie studio to be shown on YouTube. Rather than sue Google for it, he took them to court to demand access to YouTube’s user data, so he could expose and publicly embarrass each user who uploaded the video clips for “stealing” his work. What an idiot.

One of the most prominent conflicts within the media world is that of new media versus old media. Technologists argue that technology is making old media less relevant. Many go as far as to claim that old media is dying.
As an individual who is passion…

Yahoo CEO Terry Semel has flown the coop (or been booted from the nest, whatever) and I feel a small case of “I told you so” coming on.  Both GigaOm and TechCrunch wrote articles about the debacle (HERE and HERE).  And I can victoriously …

I think few businesses have loyalty to anything other than the bottom line. Even “Do No Evil” Google is starting to fall victim to skepticism over some of its actions.

Why Google would want to make movies is beyond me, but just to respond to your hypothetical: there are lots of companies, like Google, that have the financial resources to acquire talent. Financial resources aren’t everything and I don’t think Google would be successful in the entertainment business. Talent is a commodity and arguably the cheapest thing to acquire in Hollywood (there is no shortage of aspiring actors, writers, producers, etc.). What you can’t necessarily acquire with money alone is access and creativity.

To address one of the points you made earlier: there is increasing opportunity for creative people because of technology, but I would make also make the point that there is a finite amount of opportunity. Hollywood isn’t the only place where talented people often get shut out because they can’t successfully navigate the maze and don’t know the right people. Silicon Valley is like that too. Not every wannabe actor, writer or producer is going to make it, just as not every startup is going to be able to raise VC money or get bought out by Google.

Grzegorz: if it ain’t broke, why try to fix it? Change for change’s sake is not a smart business strategy. Hollywood’s core mission is to produce compelling entertainment and I think it does that pretty well. There is a lot of room for innovation when it comes to distributing content, whether it be motion pictures, television or music. But that’s distribution - not production. Maybe a technologist would pursue more rapid innvoations in distribution but I think he or she would be ill-equipped to handle the production side and if you can’t produce good content, there’s nothing to distribute.

As for Yahoo, even forgetting about Semel, did they “fail” or has Google just been amazing? Yahoo rev was up 9x and added roughly $30B in market cap under Semel’s tenure. I don’t view that as a failure at all if I don’t bring the Google comparison into it.

I hope Yahoo’s strategy isn’t to slay Google, but rather build on what it already has. If they get caught up in and consumed with “regaining our proper place in the itnernet hierarchy” it’s already over. But, if Jerry Yang finds the equivalent of the iPod for Yahoo! if he has “that vision thing” going for him (i have no clue whether he does or not), anything could happen.

“but Hollywood is still producing content that appeals to a large mainstream audience. It has been doing this since the first films were produced there.”

That’s the reason. They are doing basically the same things. At least from CEO point of view I think. There are no such problems like music companies have. There is no any “paradigm shift” in movies industry. OK, they started to produce two sequels at once but this isn’t a big change.

So when the times are “boring” then a CEO with good political skills should successfully manage any company. That’s what I wanted to say.

After rethinking I must say that the biggest mistake made Yahoo founders when they decided to hire CEO from media industry. They in fact defined Yahoo long term strategy in this move. Terry Semel was just doing his job. Unfortunately for Terry it turned out that a program schedule (Google) is more profitable than a TV station (Yahoo) in Internet world.

It means opportunity for people like myself, entrepreneurs. Absolutely, I want this to shake out!

http://www.sparkminute.com/?p=187

I live in Hollywood with lots of Hollywood friends (producers, managers, etc.) and I work in tech with lots of tech friends, so I’ve been to parties at both. I have to admit the Hollywood parties are always sexier and cooler than the tech parties, in the way they’re put together, but the tech parties always have better, more established people who have interesting things to say - even if you’re full of high profile Hollywood people, they still have that weird blank Hollywood thing going on. Plus the tech parties never have girls at them

I think the creators of movies and content in Hollywood will have no loyalty to anybody but $$ so if Google wants to make movies, i’m sure it can stack the talent.

That’s quite an amazing statement. On what is your assertion that nothing interesting is happening based? I’m the first to admit that much of the entertainment produced by Hollywood doesn’t appeal to me, but Hollywood is still producing content that appeals to a large mainstream audience. It has been doing this since the first films were produced there. Let’s not confuse Hollywood’s core business (the creation of content) with how that content gets distributed.

I’d love to see a reasoned expalantion of why a Silicon Valley veteran like Eric Schmidt, an engineer with no experience in the content/entertainment business, would be a better CEO choice for a movie studio than a person who has a track record of experience in the entertainment world.

Semel obviously didn’t work out for Yahoo and his resignation or removal should have come a lot sooner in my opinion, but I believe we’ll see more “technology” companies looking to hire media/entertainment veterans for top executive posts than we will see media/entertainment companies hiring technologists for top executive posts. The reason? I think most of the companies in Hollywood still see themselves as producers of content first and foremost whereas more technology companies are trying to see themselves as “media” companies. Hollywood executives will need to come to grips with new distribution channels, and they are, albeit more slowly than many consumers would like. Silicon Valley types will need to come to grips with the fact that they’re not probably never going to be “cool” enough for Hollywood and just can’t throw hot parties.

I guess that someone like Eric Schmidt should do quite well as CEO of Hollywood studio. Why? Because nothing interesting is happening now in movies business. At least till the time when broadband connections will be fast enough to download movie files in one hour.

You know, it is much easier to lead company when it produces f.e Spider Man 3 than to compete against Google and hundreds of other companies.

PS. Steve Jobs did quite well in animation movies business

Though I am a White Sox fan personally.

- Gald this guy is gone / please - give the founder some time as the point man

i’d rather say that the web is taking over the entertainment business.

I have done work for such companies and the best thing I ever did was to hire Manjo Sharma of http://www.differworld.com to do some executive coaching for my senior management team to work on major problems and address them before it comes to this.

Do some courses for Ceos! you can find out more here http://differworld.blogspot.com and I love the posts you put on this website.

shalom!

Mark is very competitive and it has served him well. I began communincating with him in the mid 90s a few years before yahoo bought Broadcast.com, before and after, He was always very decent, even when I disagreed with him. I won’t judge him for his desire to scream at NBA officials. Like most competitive people, he likes being right. Again, it’s a trait that’s served him very well, and again, there’s almost (never say never) no way in hell he’d take the Yahoo job.

I’m guessing he’d much rather buy the Chicago Cubs and hope he can take the curse off of them. And let’s face it, if he did that and the Cubs won a World Series under his ownership, he’d be a way bigger hero than if he had the ability to make Yahoo actually truly competitive with Google. Though getting the Cubs to win a World Series is perhaps the easier challenge…

>Semel did a horrible job, but I’d love to see how an Eric Schmidt would do as the CEO of a major Hollywood studio. “You mean we actually have to charge for our content? Why can’t we just give it away for free and place small little text ads on the side of the screen?”

That was priceless.

@ Everyone who says ‘Put Mark Cuban in there’:

No. And don’t talk it up. Mark Cuban is a hothead. I know one when I see one. No way could he handle it.