Pardon my double posting today but a series of posts really got to me and I felt the need to speak  up.  This really is the very definition of a "petty annoyance post" on my part so I apologize in advance (especially since my last post fell into vaguely the same category)

Anyway, the first quote came from Mark Evans who discusses Yahoo's current predicament...

Maybe the beginning of the end was the appointment of Terry Semel as CEO, who may go down as Yahoo’s John Sculley. Semel was intent on leveraging Yahoo’s traffic to maximize revenue. From a business perspective, it was probably the right decision but this laser-like focus on cash took away from the fact Yahoo made its mark by delivering solid services that people used and enjoyed.

There are so many things wrong with this paragraph that I barely know where to begin.  Here's a quick list though...

1. How did Yahoo! "make its mark by delivering solid services" exactly?  Yahoo! was semi successful as a portal and free e-mail provider but those services were always lackluster.  Yahoo! was never a good search engine and in fact was losing market share to Altavista before Google ever came along.  Their messaging system always sucked, their IM has always been an also ran, and so on, and so on.  Yahoo! hasn't been a successful company since the dotcom boom and is still alive largely based on a colorful brand and an early entry into the portal market
2. How did Semel get the blame for this?  I didn't personally agree with the direction he took the company but the man was brought on after the ship was already sinking.  He was fired because he couldn't get it back above water but his failure was purely one of not being able to solve the problems.  He didn't create them. 
3. This is off topic but people who throw John Sculley's name around either need to study Apple history or shut up.  Sculley had a run at Apple that was very successful overall and its Sculley that was responsible for the Mac's initial success (Jobs refused to put a hard disk in the Mac so it was largely a failure until he was ousted).  Sculley had faults to be sure but he wasn't a failure by a long shot and he's responsible for more of the current Apple mythos than he gets credit for.

The rest of the post is just about as bad.  I've been a reader of Mark Evans blog for a while and I don't mean to attack...well no, I do in fact mean to attack him here.  This post was just stupid and in this case he deserves to be attacked. If you want to discuss the history of the technology industry than you should have some idea what you are talking about. 

Anyway, Mr. Evans points to a post that amazingly annoyed me even more.  In it blogger Steve Hodson gives this advice that he believes will "save" Yahoo!

1. Kick Yang the hell out of there ASAP – like yesterday

2. Take the penalty and ditch the upper management as quickly as possible.

3. Tell Carl Icahn to go sit in the corner and STFU

4. Pay whatever it cost to buy FriendFeed ASAP

5. Put the FriendFeed boys in charge of Yahoo ASAP

You've got to be bloody kidding me.  I swear, I had to read the comments just to make sure he he wasn't kidding.  FriendFeed?  Do you have any idea how small and insignificant FriendFeed is in comparison to the whole of Yahoo?

I mean, its a nice little service but the sheer idea that FriendFeed would make any difference at all is ludicrous. 

Forget the down right insane idea of "putting the FriendFeed boys in charge" for now (he claims he was "being facetious" in that one claim but serious in all his other ones).  FriendFeed is an 8 person company with $5 Million in VC money while Yahoo! is a 14,000 person company with $7 Billion in Revenue per year.  Saying FriendFeed would make a bit of difference is like proposing a guy with a water bucket can purify the Pacific Ocean. 

I mean honestly, FriendFeed was launched less than 5 months ago and this guy just seriously suggested they have the proven leadership to not only run Yahoo! but save it from years of downward spiraling.

Geez...

I'm sorry.  This post is harsh and I know its harsh but I have to admit I don't feel the least little bit bad about it.  Really folks, how can anyone take this type of thing seriously?  It blows my mind.  If the above is considered serious discussion than what exactly is considered idiotic discussion?

Addendum: On the Semel point I offer this...

Again, hardly a great run but I wouldn't call him a failure either.

When did academia completely lose their integrity?  I wonder this while reading Kara Swisher's account of the ceremony in which Harvard Business School awarded Facebook its "30th Entrepreneurial Company of the Year Award".  Here's a quote...

While it is not yet clear exactly what kind of business case study Facebook will turn out to be in the end–a raging success or a raging something else entirely–that has not stopped Harvard from feting the hot and hyped social-networking site.

That would be the Harvard Business School Association of Northern California, which will bestow upon Facebook its 30th Entrepreneurial Company of the Year Award on June 17 at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport.

This, to me, is an embarrassment to the Harvard Business School.  From a business perspective what exactly does Facebook have to brag about?  What business school skills does Facebook epitomize precisely?

Thus far they are a company that burns through investor money while failing to come up with any way to sustain themselves.  How exactly does a company that still has no idea how to make a profit after over 4 years of existence get an award for being a well run business?

This isn't to take away from certain impressive technical innovations Facebook has made but even those are few and far between (other than the Facebook platform what technically have they really accomplished?)

This might seem like a mindless rant of annoyance and, to a certain extent, it is.  But the bigger issue here is that business organization does matter.  At some point consultants spouting words like "empowerment" and "employee self motivation" made us forget that business management is a requirement of a truly successful company (you know, the ones that actually turn profits) 

Apple engineers created technical wonders years ahead of their time between the years of 1985 and 1998 (The Jobs-less years) including not one, not two, but three different Operating Systems that were better than Windows in every conceivable way.  But the place was a chaotic mess where no one could get a project out the door.  So a company with the finest engineers in the industry stagnated despite the fact that they were creating world class products. 

That is the importance of business management.  Good process insures a business against that type of thing and you need people who have studied creating good process to make that happen. 

The same is true with making a profit.  Someone with some business sense might have said "Hey, maybe we should do some market research on this Beacon thing to see if people will consider it a horrible invasion of their privacy."  Again, the reason market research exists is to avoid just such disasters and not knowing that gets you into trouble. 

But when even the Harvard Business School seems to have abandoned the principles of good business management one has to wonder how the next generation is going to get anything done.