Keith Watanabe * NET 2.0

Another CNET commentary the other day talked about how "Jerry Yang is no Bill Gates."  Actually, the comparison is way off the mark.  The real comparison of Yang's outfit should be to Steve Jobs.  Like Apple, Yahoo had two key founders: David Filo and Jerry Yang.  Like Apple, Yahoo ended up going to another party to employ a "traditional" CEO outside of the tech industry, in this case, Terry Semel (whereas Apple employed John Sculley from Coca Cola).  And like Apple, when a non-tech CEO came to power, the company faltered.  Of course, Jobs was eventually fired by Sculley and the board, compared with Yang who is basically on a noose at the moment.  Also, interestingly enough, the article also claims that Yang has become emotionally tied with this situation, kinda like how Steve Jobs was portrayed as being emotional when his shareholders were pressuring him.  But I think the parallels are fairer when you compare green apples to red apples.

These comparisons probably are what the industry should look at.  It's 1984 all over again.  Once again, we have a major giant in online search and advertising in the form of Google, giving little choice as Microsoft is painting.  Jobs made a similar infamous speech playing the Ridley Scott directed Macintosh commercial.  Everyone is eying Google as being like IBM back then.  This time there are some changes in the roles, but I see similar outcomes.  Here, Google is IBM.  Microsoft's Gates and Ballmer are playing Steve Jobs giving a speech to the tech industry.  Yahoo is Apple with their portal, branding, and search as being the only chance of survival for the rest of the industry.  But Microsoft again is lurking in the background, waiting to pounce on the unsuspecting industry.  They've done it once, and they can do it again.

We all are very familiar with the history that Microsoft and Apple had created after that.  It was like George W Bush coming into power, after Clinton freed the nation from the GOP.  But for some reason, people believed that we needed a war and that war cost the US its reputation, its dignity, its internal economy, the freedom of its people and turned the rest of the world into a hostile environment rather than a progressive one.

Yahoo and Google (along with open source software and the web) essentially have freed us from reign of closed systems, of limiting people's career potentials and of geographic boundaries.  By uniting Microsoft and Yahoo, we would be returning to those days of being enslaved, kinda like the downtrodden masses in the 1984 Macintosh video.  I don't think we want to return to that space again.