>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!