Viewing entries tagged
Yahoo
The search engines MSN, Google, and Yahoo! go head to head and rap battle for supremacy. This is what Eminem gave birth to: Guys in blue tights and on Segways rapping about search results. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_w688s-AURE]
What would SouljaBoy say about this I wonder?
[Via]
Writer Joe Nocera published a harsh public letter today in the New York Times condemning Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang for negligently failing his duty to shareholders when he successfully engineered the rejection of Microsoft's takeover attempt of the company that he co-founded. What is interesting to me in this was the "poison pill" Yang instituted as a final safeguard against the "evil empire," which would have amounted to basically a "we have to destroy the village in order to save it" defense. What is this mysterious poison pill?
Viewing employee retention as Microsoft’s Achilles’ heel, Yang engineered an ingenious defense creating huge incentives for a massive employee walkout in the aftermath of a change of control,” reads the legal complaint. “The plan gives each of Yahoo’s 14,000 full-time employees the right to quit his or her job and pocket generous termination benefits at any time during the two years following a takeover, by claiming a ‘substantial adverse alteration’ in job duties or responsibilities.[...]
Indeed, according to the complaint, you wanted a severance plan far more aggressive than the one being recommended by your own human resources executives. Your compensation consultant called your plan “nuts” in an e-mail message. A Yahoo vice president wrote that it would be “a bizarre outcome if people who stick around make off worse financially” than people who are laid off. But another executive got to the heart of the matter. Your severance plan, he wrote, “will make things increasingly more expensive for msft though.”
Damn. That is some evil ingenious shit right there.
Read more here.
Update: One positive side effect of the Yahoo and Google ad partnership is that "Google Talk and Gmail users can chat with Yahoo Messenger users, in addition to AOL AIM users."
I subscribe to a number of advertising industry related emails, such as those sent out by MediaPost. Yesterday I received a daily round up of advertising and media related articles of note, and one in particular caught my attention. As a lead in to a San Francisco Chronicle article about Bradley Horowitz, a vice president executive at Yahoo charged with inspiring and sparking in-house innovation within the company, the MediaPost summary states:
Yahoo needs a superstar executive. Apple has Steve Jobs, Google has Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and Microsoft has Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and Ray Ozzie. Former CEO Terry Semel and former Chief Sales Officer Wenda Harris-Millard are gone, and the understated Jerry Yang lacks panache. Yahoo's Bradley Horowitz, vice president of advanced development, stands out. And advanced development is exactly what Yahoo needs--to be first in the Next Big Thing.
What's interesting to me about this is the author's choice in subjectively characterizing Yang, co-founder and the newly appointed CEO of Yahoo, as "understated" and lacking "panache." I wish I could get my sources together on this, but one of the significant barriers facing Asian Americans climbing the management corporate ladder is that eventually they bump into a glass ceiling that prevents their ability to rise from middle to upper executive management, because of an inherent impression among those in the management elite that believe Asians in America lack a certain elan and savoir faire to effectively lead and inspire a company. This perception of course is simply an extension of the pernicious racial stereotype that Asians are submissive and passive.
