Quote of the Day: Let Marc Benioff RunYahoo

Joe Nocera is a wise man, based on the William James notion that you judge someone’s intelligence by how well he agrees with you. It is time for Jerry Yang to leave Yahoo: either as part of a deal with Microsoft, or ousted by torch-bearing shareholders.

[from Talking Business - Oh Jerry, It’s No Longer Your Baby - NYTimes.com by Joe Nocera]

[…]

Jerry, you’re a billionaire because people all over the world bought your stock, and trusted you to do right by them. That’s the compact you make when you take a company public: you get to be really rich, but in return, you have an obligation to do everything you can to ensure that shareholders get a healthy return on their investment. It doesn’t matter that you would like Yahoo to remain independent, or that you can’t stand Microsoft. Your feelings aren’t supposed to get in the way of your fiduciary duty.

A takeover by Microsoft was your last, best hope of rewarding your long-suffering shareholders. Now that opportunity is gone. It says here Mr. Icahn is not going to go as gently into the night as Mr. Ballmer did — and if I were a betting man, I would be taking odds that your days as Yahoo’s C.E.O. are numbered.

It’ll be better for everyone to have someone in that role who understands who he’s supposed to be working for. Wouldn’t you agree?

The question is, if and when?

The the discussions with Microsoft seem like they are on again, but that just brings us back to the two drowning swimmers grabbing each other, as far as I am concerned (see Microsoft and Yahoo: Here Comes Yesterday).

[Update: Kara Swisher doesn’t think so, based on her discussions with Microsoft execs, but that could be a bluff to keep the pressure on Yahoo.]

An obvious alternative is a board ouster of Yang leading to a new CEO. Semel was a disaster, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the silicon valley/hollywood hybrid isn’t viable: consider Jobs and Pixar, for example.

The real problem is that the board of Yahoo — however constituted — would be too conservative, and would reach for a celebrity CEO as the answer, instead of finding some radical approach. Meg Whitman wound not help Yahoo at this point. You need a young, hungry and ambitious visionary. Like Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff.

[Update: Fred Wilson calls for a new CEO, too.]

One alternative: Yahoo could acquire some small high growth companies, and put their visionaries in positions of real importance. They’ve brought on some smart product people — like Stewart Butterfield and Catarina Fake from Flickr — and let other smart young people go — like Eric Marcoullier of MyBlogLog, now CEO at Gnip, and Jeff Bonforte, now CEO of Xobni. I think people like Marko Ahtisaari (of Dopplr and Blyk, formerly Director of Design Strategy at Nokia) are the sort of free form thinkers needed for Yahoo to get out of the last century.

I am still pissed that Yahoo hasn’t done something grand with it social tools possessions: Flickr, Delicious, Yahoo 360, Yahoo Groups, Yahoo Messenger, Yahoo Mail, and the others. Couldn’t there have been something 100X that could have been teased out of all that? But not even a grand experiment?

The AOL match up would be another case of the immediate, stumbling past being reintensified, but without a new or better result. But some of the AOL refugees could be great: Tina Sharkey, now of Baby Center, and Jim Bankoff, now working as an investor, immediately spring to mind.

So, it will be left to Microsoft to count the stacked bodies after a conquest — which won’t do much for us, the Edglings, living on the Web — or alternatively, some dark horse CEO: who might pull a Sculley, and put Yahoo into ten years of yawnsville, or perhaps come on the scene with some novel ideas and a sharp knife, gambling on big ideas and trimming off the dumb stuff. But it certainly can’t be Yang. Whatever his motivations, he’s got to go.

[Update Sun 15 June 2008: Michael Arrington examines a bunch of ex-yahooligans’ pedigrees with regard to the CEO spot at Yahoo, but I think that’s just too inbred. They need someone from outside, without the Yahoo cobwebs.]