Is Jerry Yang The Next Steve Jobs?

I just saw the news that Terry Semel has stepped down and Jerry Yang is taking over as CEO of Yahoo!

As a longtime Yahoo! fan, I see this as good news. Jerry is smart and connected to the medium in the way that Terry never was. I think Terry did a good job turning Yahoo! around in the aftermath of the Internet bubble and making decisions like buying Overture and focusing on both search and display advertising.

The question is whether Jerry and Sue Decker, who was named President, will be focused on the long term or if the Jerry/Sue team is a caretaker management team focused on finding the right strategic partnership for the Company.

It's clear that Yahoo! is seen as a value play by most Internet investors, particularly with its large holdings in Yahoo! Japan. It would be pretty easy for Jerry and Sue to focus on getting a deal at $40 to $50/share and claiming victory.

But if Jerry really wants to do a Steve Jobs and turn Yahoo! around and build something much bigger, I think he can do it. But that's going to require making some hard decisions that won't be easy to execute.

I really hope that the latter scenario plays out because right now Google is killing it (like Microsoft did in the late 80s/early 90s) and we really could use a counterweight and Yahoo! is the obvious choice.

Comments

[Bradley Horowitz]

Yep, a good thing. Terry's accomplishments are easy to forget, especially in the wake of the media's "pile on" mentality. All the same, Jerry is an incredible visionary and leader and I'm looking forward to this next phase...

[Eric Jackson]

Go get 'em Jerry and Sue. You too, Bradley!

[chad]

I know its p.c. to praise Semel but come on the guy was an unqualified disaster. His big "strategic direction" on hire was to charge users for using Yahoo apps which obviously was a no-go.

Crediting him for buying Overture is generous at best; it was an obvious purchase. And he managed to let it sit for 3 years without any improvements - meantime Google was constantly improving its offering!

Software companies should be run by software people, period.

[leafar]

Great news. The awaken of the last titan !

They will finish the puzzling of our identity around content.

[Pranav Chavda]

I would love to see Jerry Yang do a "Steve Jobs" for yahoo. but all that I can see right now is a merger with MS very very soon...
That would be the easy and smart thing to do. Trying to turn the company around and try and make yahoo the #1 internet player would be stupid and difficult (but also possible). would smart people like jerry yang do stupid things? they should.

[Megan]

I see where Jerry's passion for innovation and love of the game lead you to make this comparison, but when Steve came back to Apple it was with a clear focus on the future. He was determined to move past their mistakes and begin anew in Act 2. The symbolic move (he described at D5) of donating all Apple's original files to Stanford seemed quite literal and especially meaningful in their historical context.

But no one believes in the power of strong people to change until they witness it first hand. Not even those who worked closely with Steve at NEXT could've seen the imac and ipod coming. But the seeds of those company-making innovations had been initiated early on in very public failures, through many long forgotten products.

My prediction is that Yang's success will be determined not by taking google down in advertising alone (a losing battle, esp in a post-DoubleClick acquisition world) but by fundamentally redefining the business that Yahoo is in, with a value prop that only Yahoo possesses, and can sustain. Therein lies his challenge.