Yahoo! announced a change of CEO yesterday. I love some of Yahoo! products like Flickr, MyBlogLog, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Maps, and Delicious. When they bought Delicious, Google and Yahoo were neck in neck in terms of who had better products and a better vision. Delicious opted to sell to Yahoo as they were better in social applications at the time. Since then – for about a year now – they’ve been getting their ass handed to them by Google on every front: Mail, Search, Calendar, Maps, etc.. They are just getting dusted. Their products are no longer innovative nor even best of class. I see this move as general frustration about this fact. Jason Calacanis, an entrepreneur who speaks it like it is and is generally correct has a similar statement, saying:
“What this move shows is that–like Facebook, Apple, and Google–the founders are often times the best folks to run the business. Wall Street and investors are too caught up in the ‘professional CEO’ who knows how to ‘talk to Wall Street’ and get deals done. The fact is our business is about one thing: product.”
