On Yahoo's stupidity...

Legacy is a funny thing, depending where you draw a conclusion on a timeline. When the web was growing out of infancy in the 1990s, and Yahoo was riding high as the portal of choice, Jerry Yang had looked like a genius. In the late 90s, everybody's talking about portal, as if the mere uttering of that buzzword is enough to render a business models for alot of startup hopefuls. Indeed, Yahoo had once been the portal I used, when I first started out. I've since moved on to others, like Northern Light, then AltaVista, then simply a plain-vanilla search page from Google for my needs. I don't need the bullshits from a so-called portal.

Unfortunately, Yahoo seems to have gotten itself stuck in the adolescent stage, and never really grow up. Yahoo has pretty much remained how it's like for the past ten years, without much changes. And for those changes that it has tried to add, like photo sharing or social network, it's just a disaster.

Jerry Yang should have bowed out and moved on, like Pierre Omidyar did with eBay. But I guess Yang is too emotionally attached to it, that when their "baby" has troubles walking, daddy comes back to the rescue, like Michael Dell does with Dell Computers. Not too many people can walk away, like Bill Gates did with Microsoft, unless they get engaged with some other pet projects. (Of course, it's still quite possible that Gates could follow the same footstep, and return to Microsoft, should it get into trouble, like Yahoo and Dell do.)

Long time ago, my brother said one thing to me, "don't fall in love with your investment" (although he has his own issues in following through with his advice). Still, it's a good piece of advice, as noted in the clinical analysis of the dire situations by John Thain when he decided to sell Merrill Lynch to Bank Of America, amid the market turmoil. It's happening almost at the same time when Dick Fuld failed to let go of his beloved Lehman Brothers, which saw Barclays and other potential buyers walking away, and the government let it go bankrupt and die.

The point is, had Jerry Yang had a clear head of what Yahoo is in, he could have achieved the marketing manuveauring like Thain did, and even what Alfred Chuang was able to do, in squeezing more juice from Oracle before Chuang sold to BEA to Oracle prior to the market turning very ugly. But Yang refused negotiation on a too-good-to-be-true offer from Microsoft at $33 a share. And now, YHOO hovers around $11-12, and won't budge unless there's rumor from a resurrection of the Microsoft bid.

I'm sure it's hard for Yang to let go of Yahoo, trying to align with Google, if only just to spite Microsoft. I would not have wanted BEA to go (as the last big independent application server providers), and be sold to Oracle. But we know the force was too strong against BEA, and that it's probably 5-6 years overdue for BEA to have gone, that Chuang had never been able to produce another magic touch, like his acquiring Tuxedo and WebLogic Server. It's the exactly the same way, in which Yahoo has failed, time and again, to revive the company, but always come up short.

As an investor, I don't have confidence that Yang is able to turnaround the company to give me $33 a share in the next 1-2 years. One could argue that my time horizon is too short. If YHOO, like any other publicly traded companies, wants my money/investment, then it needs to keep up good work, which I don't see much coming about. Perhaps I'm looking at the company from the outside in, but I'm running out of patience with Yang.