I was really hoping that the much talked-about meeting of senior Yahoo types that is taking place in Sunnyvale today — which Mike Arrington describes as a meeting of the “leadership team” — would turn out to be a barn-burner, a firecracker thrown into the sleepy boardrooms of the Internet behemoth that might get some people moving again.
After reading Kara Swisher’s description of what is likely to happen, however, I’m not sure I should be hoping for much of anything. Several hundred vice-presidents doesn’t exactly qualify as a “leadership team,” as far as I’m concerned. In fact, calling it a team at all kind of distorts the meaning of the word beyond all recognition.
Technically, it’s possible that something dramatically positive will come out of the meeting, and that it will add some real meat to Yahoo’s 100-day plan to turn things around. But I’m not holding my breath. And I fear that Valleywag’s source may be right when he or she says of the 100-day idea:
The punchline is that there is no plan. Yang was just saying it in a conversational, rally-the-troops sort of way, not realizing that the Street and the Valley were going to to mark that date in red ink and count the days… The first rule of being CEO: don’t set your company up to fail.
If the plan boils down to “rewrite our ad-serving code again to try and make it more like Google’s,” then I fear for Yahoo’s future even more than I did before.
Note: for those who might not get the reference in the headline of this post, it’s from the “all your base are belong to us” meme, more information about which can be found here.