You’re Entitled to Your Own Opinion, Jerry, but Not Your Own Facts
by John Paczkowski
Posted on July 9, 2008 at 8:29 AM PT
“Facts are ventriloquists’ dummies,” Aldous Huxley once wrote. “Sitting on a wise man’s knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense.” Truer words, right? Certainly as far as they apply to Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, who is back in the press again today making the facts surrounding Microsoft’s (MSFT) pursuit of Yahoo (YHOO) sound a whole lot like the latter. Microsoft, says Yang, wants only to destabilize his company, not buy it. And Microsoft has no real desire for a deal with Yahoo, though investor Carl Icahn and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer himself have said the company would discuss one with a new Yahoo board.
Yang finds those claims “baffling.” “To trust Mr. Icahn and his board is really a bad choice,” he told The Wall Street Journal, adding that he’s the man to right the foundering company. “I think that I can bring stability back to Yahoo, and I want to get on with building company,” Yang said. “I think that the destabilizing by Microsoft has become more and more intentional. I am not happy about it.”
And who would be, with Microsoft, Icahn and others calling for your head?
Comments
Jerry Yang, ironically, is the disrupting influence at Yahoo. I still love Jerry, but my patience is wearing thin. Jerry can still save face and offer up Yahoo to the Microsoft minions (and not Balmer) and then resign. Or, just resign before irritation turns into hatred of him. Nobody wants to see Yahoo fall into draconian hands, but it’s too late now. Please, Jerry, quit it, lose the ego and rose colored remembrance of the past. We still love ya, but not for long…
Posted by patrick peterson at July 9th, 2008 at 9:02 am