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Yahoo - Slowly, Painfully Sliding to the Abyss

It seems like only yesterday Stuart Henshall and I chided Jerry Yang at Yahoo for what seemed and ill-advised strategy of sticking his head in the sand going dark for one hundred days in order to find his way out of darkness into the light.

I look at the history of my own posts and here's what I find:

This morning, it's all over the news that another pair of bright lights have joined the mass exodus from Yahoo. Here are the stories from CNN and the San Jose Mercury.

Flickr Co-Founders Latest Executives To Leave Yahoo
NEW YORK -(Dow Jones)- Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) said the co-founders of its online photo-sharing Web site Flickr are leaving, marking two more executive departures from the troubled Internet company.

Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield - the husband-and-wife co-founders of Flickr - are leaving, Yahoo spokeswoman Diana Wong said in an email. Fake's last day at Yahoo was June 13, while Butterfield's final day will be July 12.
[Read full story]
and
Two founders of Flickr to leave Yahoo
By Elise Ackerman
Mercury News
Article Launched: 06/18/2008 01:37:14 AM PDT


Flickr founders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield have joined an exodus of senior Yahoo managers, the company confirmed Tuesday.

Fake, who led the effort to create Brickhouse, Yahoo's San Francisco-based start-up incubator, will not be returning from maternity leave. Butterfield, her husband, who served as general manager of Flickr, will depart July 12.

The couple, who founded the popular photo-sharing site together and sold it to Yahoo in March 2005 for a reported $30 million, are the latest in a string of high-profile resignations that have coincided with the collapse of Microsoft's attempt to acquire Yahoo.
Beleaguered Yahoo is seeing talent flock out the door in droves due to the combination of Yang's failure to create and articulate a vision for the company and, frankly, the failure of Yahoo's board of directors to take action and do anything.

Is Yahoo salvagable? Sure, there are pieces and parts of the company that can recover and survive. But the failures are notable. Yahoo has said time and again how strong they'd play in VoIP and communications space. But the truth is, that was a load of manure. They've never done anything but talk. Yahoo's done a lot of talk on the long. slow, painful slide toward the abyss.

The most recent failure to negotiate a deal with Microsoft was icing on the cake. And like it or not, Yahoo has sweetened the deal tremendously by doing nothing. Why buy today when Yahoo's on track to be worth pennies on the dollar? That's what's in sight.

I think Yahoo's only just begun to feel how bad it's going to be for them.

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Ken Camp's Bio:

Ken Camp has more than 25 years of experience in information technology. Ken spent 17 years with AT&T and Lucent Technologies successfully designing and implementing voice and data networks. He later worked in the security marketplace and played a key role in early IPSec VPN deployments. As an independent consultant, Ken's primary focal areas include network performance improvement, security practices and the design and deployment of integrated voice and data solutions. He may be contacted at: ken_camp@realtimepublishers.net

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