The press reported on the executive changes at Yahoo but ignored the real story.
That "media" idea? Crap.
Yahoo is moving back toward being a tech company. It’s going to emphasize research, especially into search. It’s going to try, finally, to become what it should have been in the first place, which was Google.
The real tragedy people have never reported about Yahoo is that its founders had the right idea, but they sold out too early. David Filo and Jerry Yang wanted to build a site from which you could find anything, and in its early, heady days that’s what Yahoo was.
Then they hired a "grown-up" and stepped away. His name (and this is too ironic) was Tim Koogle. It was Koogle (above) who first tried to make Yahoo a media company — he called it a portal. He did it through acquisitions, of Geocities and Broadcast.Com and Yoyodyne and on-and-on, until Yahoo was extraordinarily top-heavy, filled with people whose job it was to make money off what other people were doing, not what they themselves were doing.
The hiring of Terry Semel merely
confirmed the trend. He called it media instead of portal, but the idea
was the same. To own what other people were doing, to be the exclusive
home of whatever. And it was bullshit.
Just like George W. Bush, David and Jerry were only off by one letter.
Bush attacked Iraq instead of Iran. Dave and Jerry went for Koogle when
they could have become Google.
Why did Google become Google? Why is it still Google, focused on
search, on finding what you want, rather than owning what you want.
I think it’s because the two Stanford graduate students who started Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page,
kept their hands in. They kept a big share of the company stock, they
kept the focus where it belonged, and when they finally hired a
"grown-up" it was a technologist, Eric Schmidt, who bought into what
they were saying.
There is a lesson here. It’s the same lesson Apple was forced to learn
the hard way, the same lesson Microsoft learned from the start.
You don’t need grown-ups. The kids are alright. The kids who launched
the thing weren’t flukes. They had the right stuff all along.
So David and Jerry will be forgotten by history, but Sergey and Larry won’t be.
