A former Yahoo exec looks back
Posted
Jul 28 2008, 02:09 PM
by
Kim Peterson
Rating:
Yahoo shares are down 4% today after news that the company's second-largest investor is furious with the company and may pull his support. Fund manager Gordon Crawford reportedly feels that Yahoo mishanded the acquisition bid by Microsoft. Yahoo shares are now back at $20, which is where they were before Microsoft's offer earlier this year.
The acquisition drama was accompanied by an executive exodus that was unprecedented in Yahoo's history. Among those leaving was Stewart Butterfield, who co-founded the photo sharing site Flickr (Butterfield submitted the strangest resignation letter before departing). ZDNet caught up with Butterfield and asked him about life inside Yahoo.
Butterfield said the biggest problem was that management was too oriented toward quarterly results. "If the entire focus of the company is produce a certain amount of operating free cash flow or a certain amount of capital expenditure," he said, "it isn't hard for other people to out-maneuver you, when they're not so concerned about those things."
Google is just as focused about numbers, he said, but it takes bigger risks.
Butterfield also said that Yahoo did not come out of the Microsoft fiasco looking good. "A lot of damage was done to Yahoo," he said. "Not only from a company perspective, but from a leadership and moral perspetive."
