Valleywag

Posts Tagged “

david filo

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Start Wearing Purple

Why Yahoo's purple marketing fails

Yahoo's new marketing push tells us to "Start Wearing Purple." A website created for the campaign features a video of various grungy-looking people, including Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, wearing purple and hollering. We'd show you the video, but it's not very different from a clip a tipster found of Yahoo cofounder David Filo and top exec Ash Patel dancing awkwardly to a Kelly Clarkson cover. The pair flail around like they're in some kind of bizarro-world Apple iPod commercial. That's the problem with Yahoo: It thinks it's an iPod — universally loved and carried around. But it's really a Mac — a fine product nevertheless rejected by many. More »

Feature

10:20 AM on Tue Sep 16 2008
By Nicholas Carlson
7,039 views, 17 comments

Latest by MilesEndymion: "We shouldn't make fun of people dancing. It's one of the joys that should be appreciated without judgment." Couldn't agree more. more »

yahoo

When all else fails, change the logo

Yahoo's stock may be tanking, employees abandoning ship, Carl Icahn divesting his shareholdings, and the company relying on once-hated rival Google to better profit from the site's traffic, but someone on the Sunnyvale campus has been working hard on a new logo! It's got the same jauntily jagged baseline, but dispatches with serifs for rounded linecaps. And, like much of the company's internal branding, it's finally purple. The story goes that co-founders David Filo and Jerry Yang painted the walls of the company's original office a cheery purple and yellow because it was the cheapest paint at the store. The paintjob also served to distract early employees from the fact that the roof in the office leaked. In other words, CEO Yang has a long history of slapping a cheap coat of paint over severe structural issues in the hopes of boosting morale.

1:00 PM on Thu Jun 12 2008
By Jackson West
2,309 views, 9 comments

Latest by xhooter: Seems like they're looking for remedies in the rong places. Despite the many problems with their products, I don't think there's more »

yahoo raid

Angry investors: Yahoo turned down Microsoft offer of $40 a share in 2007

A judge has unsealed documents in a shareholder lawsuit against Yahoo, the Wall Street Journal reports, and the allegations, now posted online, are explosive. Chiefly, that Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo at $40 a share in January 2007. Then-CEO Terry Semel turned Microsoft down, seeking to strike a commercial partnership instead. Slow progress in negotiating that deal made Microsoft executives impatient, leading to its unsolicited bid at $31 a share. While the plaintiffs, two Michigan pension funds, are presenting that history, it actually explains much about Yahoo's resistance to Microsoft's recent advances. More »

1:00 AM on Tue Jun 3 2008
By Owen Thomas
2,155 views, 6 comments

Latest by Michael_White_III: Yahoo should just sell to Micrsoft...stop playing hard to get. They both need each other to compete with Google! more »

acquisitions

Report: Bill Gates personally quashed Microsoft-Yahoo merger

Why didn't Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer follow through on his threat to take his $33 per share offer for Yahoo to its shareholders? Because Microsoft chairman Bill Gates tapped the brakes, reports Kara Swisher. "Numerous sources" say Gates didn't want a Yahoo merger as a way to solve Microsoft's online problems, but figured as CEO of the company, Ballmer should have free rein. More »

8:20 AM on Tue May 27 2008
By Nicholas Carlson
2,932 views, 4 comments

Latest by ClickHere: I think Gates wanted to give Ballmer free "rein." more »

microsoft

Cowed by shareholders, Yahoo's board now pushing for full merger

Like the rest of us, Yahoo's negotiators don't understand what Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer means when he says Microsoft wants to acquire just Yahoo's search business. Board members, fearing corporate raider Carl Icahn and his friends, would now prefer a full merger. Microsoft would be down with such a deal, except CEO Ballmer and company worry Yahoo cofounder Yang and Filo still won't accept a bid for less than $37 a share. We don't buy this excuse, if only because we've heard Yang and Filo don't have much say over negotiations anymore. Not after the high-fives.

10:00 AM on Fri May 23 2008
By Nicholas Carlson
1,542 views, 7 comments

Latest by xhooter: Rather than raising his bid price or launching a tender offer, Ballmer drops the bid. This frees Icahn to more »

once you're lucky, twice you're good

F is for Fitzpatrick, and "hookers and blow"

LiveJournal founder Brad Fitzpatrick is a prankster, as evidenced by his Halloween costume last year, when the new Googler dressed up as Facebook to mock his coworkers' fears of the social network. I'm told that in Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good, Sarah Lacy's new book about Web 2.0, there's an anecdote about Fitzpatrick submitting an expense report — successfully! — for "hookers and blow" when he worked at blog software startup Six Apart. That was likely a reference to the early days of LiveJournal, when users made ridiculous accusations that Fitzpatrick was spending money meant for servers and bandwidth on "hookers and blow." We'd love to hear more, but alas, Fitzpatrick only got 8 out of 294 pages, according to the book's index. Here's the page for "D" through "F": More »

1:00 PM on Fri May 9 2008
By Owen Thomas
2,200 views, 7 comments

Latest by BobDope: The way to do this is a naming convention where your servers are named things like hookers and blow. more »

breakdowns

Yahoo's real leadership problem: David Filo

Everyone's piling on Jerry Yang, saying Yahoo's founder-CEO needs to go. Why? The weak stock that provoked Microsoft's unsolicited bid may have been the result of his absentee ownership over the years. But Yahoo's deeper problem is the rot in its technical prowess. And that has everything to do with the quieter cofounder, David Filo. Filo has stayed behind the scenes, but wields considerable power over Yahoo's infrastructure. Requests for more hardware go through him, for example. When Yahoo executive Jeff Weiner joked in an internal all-hands movie about not going through IT because it was "too much paperwork," the audience surely laughed because they knew exactly what he meant. More »

Feature

5:00 PM on Wed May 7 2008
By Owen Thomas
7,408 views, 34 comments

Latest by HiQCode: The statements above about HRC and paranoids are mostly true but don't begin to touch on what the deeper problem more »

jerry yang

Yahoo can find its way, but only if it stops searching

Jerry Yang's spin campaign about why the Microsoft bid fell through is transparent. He's not trying to cajole Steve Ballmer back to the negotiating table; he's trying to cover his rear and appease indignant shareholders. The only reason he's so open about accepting a new bid from Microsoft, I think, is that he's not expecting another one to come. Ballmer has more or less said he thinks that Yahoo is worth less and less every day; last Saturday, when Yang flew up with cofounder David Filo to meet with Ballmer one last time, was as close as the two will ever get to agreeing on Yahoo's worth. The thing is, unless Yang makes some dramatic shifts, Ballmer may well be right. More »

Feature

1:40 PM on Tue May 6 2008
By Owen Thomas
2,078 views, 7 comments

Latest by FungibleMind: @feeldumb "Google would have much more well targeted information from their search data than Yahoo! will ever have." Wrong. more »

Yahoo's $37 demand talks, Microsoft's $33 offer walks Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer heeded our advice and walked away from a bid for Yahoo. Did he dodge a potentially career-ending bullet? "The talks broke down this afternoon after a face to face meeting in the Seattle area that included Microsoft CEO Steve ballmer, Microsoft exec. kevin johnson, and Yahoo co-founders Jerry Yang and David Filo." [All Things Digital] (Photo by Yodel Anecdotal)

12 comments

caption contest

On the firing line

Yahoos David Filo, Jerry Yang, Sue Decker and Blake Jorgensen watching All Hands, the Movie last week. Suggest your caption in the comments; the best will become the new headline. Yesterday's winner: WagCurious, for "Don't smell evil." (Photo byYodel Anecdotal)

4:00 PM on Wed Apr 30 2008
By Jackson West
2,299 views, 15 comments