Word: semel
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...certainly fun while it lasted. Terry Semel's six-year ride atop Yahoo! juiced up the company's annual revenue nine-fold and added $30 billion to its net worth. As Yahoo rose under his watch, AOL sank. But when you compete against the godzilla that is Google, even modest slip-ups can cost you a job. A sliding stock doesn't sit well, and second place in the Web world isn't good enough...
...Semel stepped down as CEO this week in favor of co-founder Jerry Yang, a Stanford wonder kid just like those Google guys who burst Yahoo's bubble. Yang is likely to take a back-to-basics approach to Yahoo, focusing on streamlining the company's many ventures to squeeze more revenue out of the company's new Panama advertising system, a revamped ad platform created to compete more aggressively against Google. "Yang's strengths are sentimental, technical, and basic," says Jordan Rohan, technology analyst with RBC Capital Markets...
...Hired guns like Semel, on the other hand, aren't usually cut as much slack. Semel tried to inject Yahoo! with some Hollywood flair, but it was ultimately his downfall. In 2004, he drafted former ABC mogul Lloyd Braun to run Yahoo!'s media and entertainment division. That multiheaded beast included Yahoo!'s movies, TV, entertainment, music, games, finance, news and weather, sports, health and kids businesses. If that sounds like a lot under one departmental roof, it was. Braun eventually left and the division was restructured...
...Still, not all of Yahoo's efforts fared as poorly as Semel's entertainment strategy. Its photo, email, travel and mobile offerings have proved popular and have been successful audience-builders. But Yahoo's broad array of assets have proved difficult to manage, prompting the so-called Peanut Butter Manifesto last year, in which senior VP Brad Garlinghouse argued that Yahoo! was spreading itself too thin. And now that Yahoo has created a precedent in shedding Yahoo! Photos in favor of Flickr, it may cut down further on other businesses to focus on its core offerings...
...interview with TIME last January, Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield said that there was, for a long time, a lot of uncertainty within Yahoo about whether it was a tech company or a media company. He noted that before Semel joined Yahoo, there had been some drifting and ambiguity about its mission. Recently, though, Butterfield said, Semel had focused Yahoo on being a communications and communities company. That's where it remains today, according to the company's mission statement, and that's where Yang and Decker are likely to focus. "What he missed was the emergence of Google...