Yahoo AOL Talks

I guess I can confess that I am baffled by Yahoo, a company that only a few years ago had such promise and was buying up what I would have bet was a critical mass of social tools companies — Delicious, Flickr, MyBlogLog, etc. — but was unable to herd the cats up the beach. Really smart innovators — Jeff Bonforte, Eric Marcoullier, Joshua Schachter, Stewart Butterfield, Catarina Fake, etc. — were brought into the company and lost. I had expected that some Einsteinian social theory of everythingness would emerge from that group, but instead Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘social graph’ spoutings have captured the tech scene’s imagination instead.

So the braintrust has left the building, including people that really got it, like Bradley Horowitz — now at Google — and now Yang is hoping to buttress the companies diminishing management team by acquiring AOL?

[from Reset: What’s Next for Yahoo? (Merging With AOL? New Execs?) | Kara Swisher | BoomTown | AllThingsD]

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Definite topics: the progress of talks to buy AOL from Time Warner (TWX)–probably Yahoo’s most attractive option, if it can get a good price–and which are more serious than has been reported; whether the company has any strategic interest in making up with Microsoft (MSFT) after a year of acrimony; how the company can attract new top-level talent to reinvigorate itself; how to make nice with disgruntled major investors; and, of course, how to react to the troubled economy, which is sure to impact the advertising business.

In fact, Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Jerry Yang is acutely aware that he and his management team have only a few months to really show investors and employees that they can get things moving at the beleaguered company.

Oddly enough, the Wall Street meltdown might not be such a bad thing for Yahoo, given that investors have a lot of other bigger problems to worry about now.

In relative terms, with a strong balance sheet, the company is quite healthy compared with many firms.

While a possible recession and subsequent negative impact on the ad market is not a good thing for Yahoo, it is not a good thing for anyone in the space.

And Yahoo remains one of the top players in terms of size and will be the place advertisers flee to in times of uncertainty.

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But, the deal would give Yahoo some more experienced executives it needs, and make it more attractive to others who might not consider going to Yahoo in its present state.

Yang had been pinging a lot of execs over the last year and has had little uptake.

Big surprise. But I am baffled about the idea of getting ‘experienced managers’ from AOL, which has had it’s own braindrain over the past few years.

I know Yang has to do something or get executed, and it has to be an acquisition since the company has squandered the past few years and lost the bright minds that might have come up with something. But this?