Don't ask me what went wrong with Yahoo
Finally, Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang is going public with his post-100-day plan: deny, deny, deny. Amidst a tour of Europe to explain his new vision for Yahoo, Yang told the Telegraph that it would be simply incorrect to talk about what went wrong at Yahoo under now-departed CEO Terry Semel's reign.
Yang told his interviewer:
If you look at Yahoo over the past few years, we have been generating revenues north of $5 billion and operating cash flow of over $1.9 billion, so people shouldn't look at companies with that kind of profile and ask what went wrong. Yahoo today is a great consumer brand, one of the strongest brands on the Internet.
Jerry, some unsolicited advice. Next time, get over the jet lag before you take your interviews. You won't sound so defensive. Sure, if Yahoo were in a vacuum, you could argue its revenues and cash flow remained healthy during Semel's reign. But Yahoo didn't operate in a vacuum. $5 billion in revenues? Great. Google's doing nearly that much in a single quarter now.
The Telegraph points out that Google's share price has nearly doubled, reaching $694 this morning, while Yahoo's share price remains below its 2005 starting point of $35. Don't forget, Semel was there when Yahoo had the chance to buy Google for $1 billion. It's worth more than 200 times that now.
There are, we're sure, some folks in Sunnyvale who aren't in this level of denial. Oh wait: They're all leaving.