News flash, more to come.
http://blip.tv/play/gfIU2LEvhZlM
In this interview, I ask Yang why he’d want to stay as CEO. The interview as widely cited as evidence he should leave. I for one have a lot of respect for what Jerry has been trying to do, but can only imagine he’s feeling tremendous relief. Now, the hunt for a replacement. Who do you think should lead Yahoo?
Not Sue Decker.
Short-list:
*Dan Rosensweig
*Jonathan Rosenberg – real product focus.
*Tim Armstrong
John, if the job is offered to you, would you take it? You already demonstrate vision on this blog and execution in your various events.
Nobody should replace Yang. The Board should finally just engineer the MSFT-YHOO deal at $17/share. YHOO shareholders get a 60% premium to today’s close and MSFT shareholders get YHOO at a 50% discount to the rumored $34 bid this summer. Everybody wins!
rosenberg is an interesting thought. what about peter chernin? he’s in the middle of renegotiating his contract at fox…and he’s not yet had the top job.
no one want change a job during world financial crisis 🙁
Yahoo! needs a new leader that will Disrupt and use White Space to chart a new course. Someone who will compete with Google and improve the web for all of us. Certainly not Microsoft – a new leader wtih the moxie to compete. Read more at http://www.thephoenixprinciple.com
yahoo wants the new leader of the ceo
Who cares? One-size fits-all search engines are simply relics of traditional media (in which consumers found “answers” instead of “conversations”). So portals like Yahoo or Google will ultimately sink like stones and the web 3.0 (in which links are superfluous — see http://gaggle.info/post/104/trick-or-treat-its-web-30-d ) will bubble up a new order in which the wisdom of the language ( http://gaggle.info/miscellaneous/articles/wisdom-of-the-language ) is the guide for renewed collaborative efforts — only this time, collaboration will be inclusive rather than exclusive (i.e., if users select the same language/community, then they will collaborate in a milieu of shared self-determination).
Old-fashioned marketers & advertisers may continue to wonder why all of the money they are pouring into one-size fits-all so-called “search” engines are not leading to increased revenue — they will simply have missed the boat.
Its about time he leaves but I blame the board for not taking this action sooner…….on his watch Yahoo lost the Microsoft deal and the Google joint search venture.
It’s the Web 2.0 Summit curse: sit down on stage with John Battelle, start polishing your resume on the way out. Terry Semel, Jonathan Miller, I can’t remember the others. I mean this was a gimme but I love that your streak is intact.
I suggest Yahoo!’s board would be wise to think about acquiring Federated Media for a stock swap deal and offer John Battelle the top job. Battelle can bring to Yahoo! his vision and with the FM team to support him, and his contacts, I suggest the future for Yahoo! would brighten considerably. Your thoughts, John?
Dan Rosensweig, would be a disaster for the company (he should not even be in the short list).
He is from the Terry Semel are and was trying build a “media company” whatever that means. These guys could not even explain “what a media company” is – and the employee base was left clueless on what the focus area should be. Even on the operations front he sucked.
Yahoo! has taken important steps to focus the company and has at last begun excuting (and delivering) on them. The new CEO, should help push the company aggresively forward in these areas.
nmw,
Everyone cares since GOOG and Yahoo! make up a lion’s share of the revenue earned (and dollars distributed) on the internet. Even if there is a large shift in the way search works there is a good chance it is pioneered by one of these companies, or in the least influenced heavily by them. I also read the post you linked to on the widsom of language and would have to say that I think Google’s ability to find the important over the relevant is a preferable method of finding things. Popularity, style, trends, and ego traps dictate what people are interested in. That being said- it was a very interesting post and a web that operates on some other form than our current page-link model is surely upon us at some point. (Check out Kevin Kelley’s video on Youtube).
Hi Chris,
I was doing graduate research on information retrieval using natural language processing since when you were a baby — so the “semantic web” is nothing new to me.
I’ve watched some of Kevin Kelly’s videos (don’t know which one you mean), and I’ve think I commented on his blog at least once before.
One thing many computer scientists and/or engineers do not seem to understand about language is that you can’t think “outside of the box” of language (or at least you cannot write expressions for such ideas). In other words: language is the fundamental “format”.
Even linguists sometimes have a “strange” notion of language — as if it were something that is acquired. From another point of view, it could be argued that the expressions — the vocabulary — of a newborn baby far exceed exceed those of an adult. Adults can no longer learn sounds tiny babes are able to articulte. As children age, their capacity to formulate/articulte “new” language becomes ever more limited, and their open-mindedness turns into hardened, rote memorization of phonemes and buzzwords with compartmentalized meanings. So what many refer to as “language acquisition” (or “learning”) can also be interpreted as a rampant growth of prejudice and a simple progression towards increased stupification.
When people talk about AI, they often talk about making machines that can be as “intelligent” as such humans as have been trained to be capable of using such lexemes as “sit”, “roll over”, “play dead”, etc.
All of such starry eyed visions concerning AI are a waste of time — computers will never catch up with humans. They will only be able to imitate intelligence by pretending to understand what “sit”, “roll over”, “play dead”, etc. mean. The fact is that language is constantly in flux, and so not only can machines not understand it — no one can understand it. The best we can do is to understand how people used to use language X years ago.
But without a doubt: Language can (and should be) encoded in some “standardized” format. The way I say “Achtung!” will differ from the way someone else says “Achtung!” Likewise, I will have a different pschological structure than someone else for the meaning of the term. But there is a fuzzy set of phenomena that is “good enough” to be characterized as “Achtung!” (and this is also the case for OCR). The point is: all of these “fuzzy sets” are reduced to the same code (much the same way the vast “unadultered” capacity of a baby’s brain is reduced to the prejudices of the adult).
Therefore I propose the acronym “AI” be replaced with “ASS”: Artificially Synthesized Stupidity.
😉 nmw
ps: If I were to subscribe to Kevin Kelly’s notion of that one “thing” that is “out there”, then I would say it is indeed a technology — and the name for that technology is plain & simple: Language.