

Can We Please Have Jerry Back? - vibhavs
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/22/can-we-please-have-jerry-back/

======
dcurtis
I'm confused.

Carol Bartz is not stupid nor a bad leader. In the early 1990's, Autodesk was
failing. It was unfocused, undefined, and it was easy to see the atrophy of
quality in its products. There was no leadership, and the young company was
losing the faith of its own customers. It was basically a miniature version of
where Yahoo was last year when Arrington was calling for Yang's head.

Bartz came into Autodesk and turned the company around. She cut products that
weren't working, she focused the company's energy on AutoCad and other cash
cow products, and she developed a pretty awesome culture that still exists
today. She took risks at Autodesk, and pushed the company to explore products
that seemed impossible to build. But some of those experiments turned into
extremely successful features of AutoCad (many of them failed, too, but she
developed a culture that encouraged failure with quick abandonment).

When Bartz went to Yahoo, I was expecting a repeat of her early days at
Autodesk. But it hasn't happened. She just started cursing at the news media
and firing people. She has not created a focused product strategy. She has
taken a failing Yahoo culture and somehow made it even worse.

Given her track record, I don't understand why she has accomplished so little
in time she has had. Something does not add up.

~~~
Keyframe
> Given her track record, I don't understand why she has accomplished so
> little in time she has had. Something does not add up.

probably because Autodesk bought it's way into the market in the 90's,
starting with discreet - and only then reshuffling a bit. You can watch the
interview with Dan Drake (Autodesk cofounder) on NerdTV (we need that show
back ASAP) - <http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/shows/> ... hear what he is
saying, buying in to the market is a great way to do business. Autodesk is not
favorite company amongst companies, but it sure can do business.

edit: everyone, be sure to watch that video even if you don't give rats balls
about autodesk or anything. Guy gives some serious experience / advice how
they went from startup to godzilla.

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jasonlbaptiste
This is all a shame. Yahoo has lost its soul aka focus on product and trying
to be innovative. They talk about VCs having walking dead companies and Yahoo
reminds me of that on a much grander scale. I grew up as a kid using Yahoo
(like 96/97) and it has some sentimental value.

It also upsets me because they had awesome talent there in terms of
product/engineering. They all left one by one. Here's just a small list of
names I could think of off the top of my head:

Caterina Fake Joshua Schachter Stewart Butterfield Jeremy Zawodny Cal
Henderson Bradley Horowitz Ian Rogers Jeff Bonforte Susan Mernit Salim Ismail
Jeff Weiner

Those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. There are
countless others who have left, and probably it's even sadder that some
awesome talent is still fighting the good fight there. Sadly, there's no real
product focus worth a damn that they can make good use of their talents with.
They could have also acquired other top tier talent if there wasn't such an
exodus during the initial bid by Microsoft. I wonder what a group of 10-15 of
smart product focused hackers+product guys from yc/hn would do to fix Yahoo!
up. hmm, feel free to email me thoughts, could make for an interesting
potential blog post/theoretical situation.

~~~
natrius
When I worked there two years ago, there was clearly a lot more non-brand name
talent that you never hear about. With the people Yahoo had (some of which it
still has), they should have been able to do great things, and they _did_ do
great things from a technical perspective. It's been a tragic failure of
leadership.

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
Yup, those are just the names that are well known. I'm sure for everyone of
them there were/still might be 5 more. Things like Yahoo Dev Network, Hadoop,
etc. are awesome initiatives and I always keep my fingers crossed that they
keep them going.

~~~
plinkplonk
"Things like ... Hadoop ... are awesome initiatives"

Doug Cutting left too IIRC.

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sachinag
Honestly, I don't get the whole "Yahoo has neglected products" meme at all.
The new homepage is an improvement; the new SERPs are a huge improvement; the
new Yahoo Mail is pretty good (although I still prefer Gmail); Yahoo Sports is
awesome; OMG gets more traffic than TMZ; Flickr still rocks; and so on.

Could it be even better? Sure. I'd love to be the overall product czar at
Yahoo (hire me, Carol; forget that Brad Garlinghouse fellow who cut and run),
flitting about from team to team demanding polish on various bits and pieces.

But Yahoo does better at selling premium ad space than anyone else on Earth -
and they're creating _more_ premium ad space than anyone else on Earth with
their content investments in Sports, News, Finance, OMG, and so on.

------
halo
I'm not really sure why Techcrunch dislike Bartz.

Yahoo have been struggling with their position in search for years, and they
have been losing marketshare. They have an inferior product, and they haven't
been able to compete technologically with their main competitor. Their
advertising platform isn't big enough to maximise their returns, since Google
has most of the mindshare.

A partnership with Microsoft for search engine technology seems like a decent
approach, since Microsoft are willing to put the investment in to ensure
Bing's search technology is as good as Google's, and their combined single ad
platform is going to advantageous to both companies.

Yahoo aren't giving up on search. They're still going to have a search engine,
afterall, and Yahoo is still going to have their own custom interface with
Bing's results being the backend. Ultimately, they're just giving up trying to
compete technologically with Google. They've long been unable to do that
anyway - no-one uses Yahoo for their superior results.

So what's next for Yahoo? Slimlining. Strengthening their core businesses -
refreshing their main services (portal, e-mail, messenger) combined with an
advertising push is good, as is their plans to expand into the Arabic markets.
Closing dated, unpopular, or unprofitable services (are people seriously
mourning the loss of Geocities, Yahoo Brief Case and Yahoo 360?). Getting rid
of properties or partnerships that differ from their core business as a
content provider. I honestly don't see what's so bad about that.

Were people expecting miracles in 8 months?

------
sahaj
back when carol was first hired, i asked how she was going to turn the company
around. it's not just about running a good business, its about having a
product/technology that's better than the competition and being able to
monetize it. i think MSFT and YHOO can do it if they work together, but their
cultures don't really get along all that well and both are fighting for the
same piece of the pie.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=497570>

------
JCThoughtscream
"Yahoo is to tech what General Motors is to autos." - McRib

Quite possibly the most epic burn I've seen all month.

------
ojbyrne
Seems like a simple rule. Non-founder CEOs suck.

~~~
lionhearted
That's not true - there's been great non-founder CEOs promoted from within and
great outsider CEOs in history. Actually, you really want one of those in a
crisis that your current team hasn't been able to dig itself out of.

First to come to mind is Lou Gerstner, who turned around IBM. I read his
autobiography about the experience - crazy stuff. He was up against so much
built up gunk and bureaucracy, that only an outsider could've broken.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_V._Gerstner,_Jr.#IBM>

[http://www.amazon.com/Elephants-Dance-Inside-Historic-
Turnar...](http://www.amazon.com/Elephants-Dance-Inside-Historic-
Turnaround/dp/0060523794)

