Seems odd that on the day we protest the corporate driven legislation that threatens the web, we find ourselves contemplating the resignation of Chief Yahoo and pioneering web organizer, Jerry Yang.
Read my take Yang’s future on the Asian American Legal Defense and Education blog at www.aaldef.org/blog
Yang resigned yesterday, leaving the company he founded while a student at Stanford in 1995.
It was a very different world and a very different internet back then.
Of course, the business and the corporate world remains the same. Heartless, cold, money-driven.
Given that, how did Yang ever survive his biggest faux pas? After all, his success has nothing to do with cool technology or intricate algorithms. In 2008, it wall about simple math.
That’s when he blew it on the Microsoft deal.
Rejecting the Microsoft take-over bid at more than$30 a share, nearly twice what the company was worth, was a tad naive for our country’s brand of hard-ass capitalism.
Yang didn’t want to take the money and run. He had a dream, after all. But even after that, he stayed. When he was ousted as CEO, he hung around. And now he’s gone from Yahoo for good.
I’ve got some suggestions for Yang 5.0. on my blog at the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund:
http://aaldef.org/blog/bye-bye-yahoo-hello-jerry-yang-50.html
Yang at 43 is a bit of a throwback, a geek’s geek, less corporate money guy. And certainly less political.
If the web’s old values are to be enshrined as “the way,” it’s going to take a lot more political might from web veterans like Yang to protect it.
The fight over SOPA and PIPA is about how old media companies are trying to take back their old monopolies.And they’re using tried and true methods, the kind of special interest lobbying that produces legislation that protects the likes of Big Pharma, Big Auto, Big Oil, etc.
SOPA and PIPA would have the effect of changing the democratizing nature of the web. It’s got nothing to do with privacy. Just money and control. A taming of the world wide web? That’s way different from scouring and searching the web for whatever cool stuff was on it.
That was what a younger Yang was all about when he was a graduate student and Yahoo was his baby.
