Monday, June 18, 2007

Yahoo! (YHOO) Has a New CEO

Let's get this straight - Terry Semel has been ousted and deservedly so. But the guy owns 1.5% of the company's shares, so naturally the company is spinning this as Jerry Yang being "named CEO" as opposed to Semel "being ousted".

Semel is being put into the role of non-exec chairman. Congrats to the droves of shareholders who voted against the Semel led slate last week. Susan Decker, exec VP named as company president. As expected, YHOO trading up a little more than $2 on the news.
What I find funny is that CNBC's Faber earlier downplayed the rumors that Semel was on his way out. Score one, AGAIN, for the web world where the Jack Myers newsletter hit it on the head this morning with the early word that Semel would be toast. Faber, to be fair, has had a number of scoops, if not real coups and everyone gets it wrong sometimes. This one again goes in the catagory of "You're Only As Good As Your Information", and nowadays that means going far beyond cable tv to get your information.

EDIT: earlier I asked the rhetorical question of who the next, real CEO of Yahoo! might be... apparently Mr. Yang says he is in it for the long haul. I don't know, but ok, for now. Read: My New Job. I even went so far as to throw my two cents in on how the Yahoo! Finance site should be made better. They surely can't do what they've been doing. Enabling the user of the site to come up with his own ideas through unique sources of content (like blogs) and to offer an array of tools (which is why I've been developing my options screener) is the wave of the future. Honestly, how often is it that you make money from something traditional like the Wall Street Journal, AP, or Yahoo Finance? I can think of one instance this year, the buyout of Sallie Mae which was telepgraphed the day before in the Journal -- perhaps there were a few other times as well, but traditional, commoditized media is giving you old news. Regular readers here have gotten the early heads up on a number of situations and surely if I can do it, Yahoo! ought to be able to enable their users to get a leg up as well. Yahoo's message boards, overrun by spam, sure are not the answer to getting useful insights and ideas, nor is their regurgitation of AP.

No comments: