Keith Watanabe * NET 2.0

I'll stand by my position that ignoring the shareholders plea to be bought out by Microsoft was a very good move by Yahoo.  As mentioned multiple times, the deal with Microsoft buying out Yahoo was rotten from the start.  It honestly wouldn't have helped anyone except the shareholders in the short term future.  But who really gives a shit about shareholders honestly when it comes to maintaining a vision or purpose in a company? (well, yeah it's Yahoo, but I do have a point in there some place....)

Now as part of the fallout we're seeing Yahoo's executives leaving in the troves for higher ground.  I'm going to be in the minority in saying that this is a great thing.

There's a comment over at Techcrunch which says "Is this the end of Yahoo as we know it?"  Well, the Yahoo as we know it isn't functioning very well.  It hasn't been performing in years to the degree that we want.  Well, while I do support the idea of Yahoo remaining independent, it is true that the people running the show must be either held accountable or receive the ax.  Or just leave.

But more than that, you gotta see two great benefits out of this: 1) it allows younger, more energetic people to step up to the plate potentially and take those coveted spots; 2) those executives were part of the reasons why Yahoo wasn't able to maintain a higher competitive position.

People see Yahoo as the sinking Titanic.  I see it as a phoenix about to be reborn.  It's like the movie Spiderman where you had the Green Goblin telling Spiderman how people enjoy seeing heroes fall.  Yahoo has been our hero for a long time and there's a lot of people that are jumping off the bandwagon just because of some wrong moves.

Probably, Yahoo needed this house cleaning and wake up call internally and externally.  When you reach the level of dominance and market penetration as Yahoo, you attempt to figure out the next level.  They've missed numerous chances to pick up key companies like Google or Facebook.  But the truth is that probably in the overall scheme of things that wasn't such a bad thing (except for short term betting shareholders).

What Yahoo needs from this is to start promoting internally and/or get some external visionaries to take Yahoo to the next level.  They need to re-invent themselves, not allow themselves to whore themselves out to their shareholders who have enslaved them.  I've proposed several ideas about how Yahoo can achieve this (i.e. becoming a media platform for 3rd party developers and hosting service).

The other thing is that the people on top need to (in some way) shut themselves out from all the main criticism and simply figure out for themselves what they want to do with Yahoo.  Forget the money thing.  They already have a great position in the market but just need to determine what Yahoo means as a business.  I honestly don't believe it's as complicated as people are making things to be.  But until they stop being pussies and allow themselves in being bullied around by shareholders and venomous critics, they aren't going to repair their image for a while.