June 18, 2007 2:49 PM PDT
Is Yang right to run Yahoo?
Jerry Yang is finally running Yahoo, the search company he started as a Stanford graduate student 13 years ago with his buddy David Filo. Over the years, Yang has served as the public face of the company while more experienced executives were in charge. On Monday, Terry Semel, recruited from Hollywood to run the company six years ago, passed the baton to Yang.
But does Yang have the management chops to run the company, which is struggling in the face of strong opposition from Google? What do he and Sue Decker--who is stepping up to be president from her former roles as head of advertising and chief financial officer--have in mind to right the ship?
I'll be publishing a more in-depth story on this soon.
Elinor Mills covers Internet security and privacy. She joined CNET News in 2005 after working as a foreign correspondent for Reuters in Portugal and writing for The Industry Standard, the IDG News Service, and the Associated Press. E-mail Elinor. 
Yahoo is more intrusive than Google, which seems to be headed down the same path.
It seems that Google is continually losing sight of the decrapified simplicity that got them where they are today.
Yahoo already has an answer to most of Google's core products.
My idea for Yahoo is that they could beat Google at it's own game by doing an about face and making their products less intrusive.
When companies deploy more advertising there is an initial spike in hits and ad sales, but this tends to taper off as users are driven to other solutions.
They see the initial gains from round 1 and believe it to be successful, so as they become more desperate to make more money, they squeeze their users tighter with more ads.
This is a popular strategy with web CEO's that can't see the forest through the next quarters numbers.
Brand name is everything, and they should be careful not to tarnish it.
Yahoo has made some mistakes, but nothing they can't recover from. I believe as Google continues to lose trust Yahoo could focus on gaining it.
As far as I'm concerned, at this juncture, Yang's job is going to be fraught with risks, but at the same time, its probably the most exciting position there is in technology today.