All Things Digital

After months of agonizing introspection, it appears Yahoo (YHOO) President Sue Decker has finally gotten in touch with her true feelings about Carl Icahn. In an interview with CNBC Wednesday, Decker welcomed the billionaire backseat-driver to Yahoo’s board of directors with a big wet PR kiss. “I’m totally looking forward to meeting [Carl],” she said. “I’d love for him to learn about our business and I’d love to get his advice. So there are absolutely no hard feelings of any sort. I think the best thing I can say is that we’re moving forward and we’ll have the distractions behind us, and I want that for our employees and I want that for our company.”

Hug it out, Sue. Hug it out.

Yahoo (YHOO) is unsealing new advertising deals nearly as quickly as that Delaware court is unsealing the ” unflattering” details of the company’s failed merger talks with Microsoft (MSFT).

During her keynote at the Advertising 2.0 conference in New York today, Yahoo President Sue Decker (pictured above with Jerry Yang) announced the company’s latest online advertising initiatives, among them a multiyear video and display ad deal with Walmart.com (WMT), a global partnership with interactive agency Havas Digital (which will be an early adopter of the company’s AMP platform), an agreement with CBS (CBS) that will see the network’s programming added to the Yahoo TV lineup, and a new newspaper marketing program called Yahoo Circular, which allows retailers to deliver “personalized” newspaper circulars to Yahoo users.

Amazing how the fear of a hostile takeover can motivate a company, isn’t it?

Notably absent from this smorgasbord of partnerships: a deal with Microsoft, which these days seems the only thing that will appease the company’s irate shareholders. That said, such a deal could still be in the works. During an appearance on CNBC’s “Power Lunch” today, Decker said Yahoo remains “engaged” in “ongoing” discussions with Microsoft. “What I said today, I think is pretty consistent with what [Microsoft CEO] Steve Ballmer said last week at the D Conference … which is that Microsoft has indicated that it’s in discussions with us about various partnerships,” she explained. “I can’t comment on the specifics of any kind of discussions.”

This year’s D conference had its share of great lines–tired ones, too (we’re all clear on the subject of Facebook and information sharing, right?). Here’s a selection of the former…

Guys like us avoid monopolies. We like to compete.”

–Microsoft (MSFT) Chairman Bill Gates

AOL is the Rodney Dangerfield of the Web. We don’t get no respect.”

–Jeff Bewkes, president and CEO, Time Warner (TWX)

I will probably never be a CEO again.”

–Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Jerry Yang states the obvious

It’s a company that creates technology.”

–Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg answers the question, “What is a technology company?”

Read more »

A tough act to follow, last year’s D: All Things Digital 5. How do you best, or even match, a 75-minute joint interview with Microsoft (MSFT) Chairman Bill Gates and Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs–a history-making history lesson taught by two principal protagonists of tech’s narrative? Summon Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse from the dead to reminisce about the “War of Currents”?

No. Better to let history make itself, as it always has, and focus on making news. And it’s likely there will be quite a bit of it coming out of D: All Things Digital 6. With this year’s lineup, how could there not? Microsoft’s Bill Gates and CEO Steve Ballmer onstage together just a month before Gates steps back from his day-to-day duties as company chairman. Time Warner (TWX) CEO Jeff Bewkes talking strategy as the media giant prepares to spin off Time Warner Cable and tries to figure out just what the hell to do with AOL. Lowell McAdam of Verizon Wireless (VZ) and FCC Chaiman Kevin Martin appearing separately, but together offering an insider view of the telecom industry as it grapples with issues of Net neutrality, open access and early termination fees. And then there’s Yahoo’s (YHOO) Jerry Yang and Sue Decker, who’ve been struggling to right a foundering Internet pioneer as it battles Google (GOOG), Microsoft, investor-agitator Carl Icahn and itself.

And that’s just a sampling. Clearly, there’s much to talk about. Much news to be made.

Sure, we may not have managed to arrange another tete-a-tete as historic as last year’s Gates/Jobs interview.

But we did manage to get Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Yahoo Co-Founder Jerry Yang on the same stage–albeit at different times. Still, no easy feat, that.

And who knows, perhaps we’ll get them onstage together as well.

So join us at d6.allthingsd.com tomorrow for as-it-happens, all-access coverage of the conference. Liveblogs of the sessions and demos. Videos of the speakers. Photos of attendees. You’ll find it all here.

(Photo illustration by Beth Callaghan)

“There’s a reason why we’re the only fortune 500 company with an exclamation point at the end of our name,” Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang said yesterday. “And now is the time to demonstrate what that exclamation point stands for.”

Today investors are doing just that. Sadly for Yang, it’s with criticisms and epithets, not calls to arms. Seems Yahoo (YHOO) investors’ view of what that exclamation point stands for post-Microsoft (MSFT) differ just a wee bit from Yang’s. What follows is a selection of reader comments on Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang’s “OK, So Now What?” blog post:

• Dear Mr. Yang, You had the opportunity to provide your shareholders and dying company with a somewhat respectable exit. A 70% premium sat in your lap and you had the ARROGANCE to ask for more.

• I don’t doubt that the pro-Microsoft crowd is celebrating right now. I’ll bet no one in Redmond wants to go through the pain of integrating with a company that has undergone an engineering talent-exodus and is becoming irrelevant in its core technologies. So as a Microsoft shareholder, thank you for acting in my best interests. Had you accepted Microsoft’s offer it would most certainly have crippled Ballmer and company.
• Hi Jerry, Nice job. … Now will you please buy my 500 shares at $31. I mean it’s a great deal for you since your stock is worth $37 as you say.
• How are you going to turn this aging hippy around? How about coming out and announcing Yahoo’s new strategy. You can start by appointing Sue Decker CEO.

Looks like Yahoo really has become more nimble following the ouster of former CEO Terry Semel. The company appears to have completed its 100-day review in half that time. Not 50 days into CEO Jerry Yang’s top-to-bottom100-day review of the company, and Yahoo is shaking up its top management ranks. In a memo to employees yesterday afternoon, the struggling Internet giant sent its top sales executive packing and announced a new global sales organization.

Greg Coleman, executive vice president of global sales, will leave Yahoo in February. His responsibilities will be assumed by executive VP Hilary Schneider, who’s been tapped to lead the company’s new sales division, called Global Partner Solutions. “As many of you know, Greg Coleman has been actively engaged in leading the integration of Yahoo!’s search and display ad sales teams and communicating the benefits of our more integrated capabilities to our major clients, who have been very receptive to this holistic approach,” Yahoo President Sue Decker wrote in the memo. “This integration is now well underway, and his leadership and expertise have helped enormously to effect a smooth transition. He and I have discussed for some time the need to further integrate Yahoo!’s capabilities in order to better support the needs of our key customer groups.

“Therefore, with the decision to create this new Global Partner Solutions unit under Hilary’s leadership, we mutually agreed that Greg would leave Yahoo! to pursue other opportunities. We are fortunate that he will continue to assist us in this transition through February, closely advising the team. We deeply appreciate Greg’s contributions to Yahoo! over the past six and a half years, a period in which our advertising revenues have increased from $600 million a year to more than $6 billion, with substantial growth not only in the U.S. but in Europe, Asia and key emerging markets around the world. We wish him the best of luck in the years ahead.”

Which, as loosely translated by BoomTown’s Kara Swisher, means: “OK, we’re not going to smack you publicly like we did ex-ad sales exec Wenda Millard, even after she made us piles of ad money over the years, as you did, as long as you go quietly and don’t disparage us after you go.”

“Our financial performance is not what we would like to see long-term.” This, from Blake Jorgensen, Yahoo’s chief financial officer who, just six weeks into the job, is already well versed in the company’s fiscal truisms. During Yahoo’s second-quarter earnings call yesterday–his first since being named CFO–Jorgensen trotted out all the company’s hoary earnings-call chestnuts: “slower growth than originally expected,” “weakness in display advertising,” “there is much hard work ahead,” and, of course, the hoariest of all, “we are lowering our outlook for INSERT LATEST QUARTER HERE,” which at this point in Yahoo’s history might as well be the company’s motto.

Good thing then that Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang intends to dramatically improve the company’s performance and put it back on a winning path. How? A top-to-bottom, 100-day review of the company. “I intend to spend the next 100 days mapping out a game plan and working with … the team to put the right organization in place and make any necessary changes,” Yang explained. “We need to invest in areas that are most critical to our success and de-emphasize those that are underperforming or don’t match up with our priorities. There will be no sacred cows.“

There will, however, be an “ecosystem,” which Yang and Co. mentioned no less than 17 times during the course of yesterday’s earnings call. It is apparently either a euphemism for Yahoo’s business, the outfit worn by Yang in the photo above, or the self-sustaining biosphere where the company keeps Yahoo co-founder David Filo.

From Yang and Yahoo President Sue Decker:

“Yahoo is an ecosystem that involves several hundred million participants every single day.

“We plan to create value through our ecosystem.

“When I step back and think about how we can fully leverage our ecosystem, I see a world where Yahoo is a place that consumers love.

“We’re really focused on understanding how Yahoo as an ecosystem can drive value long-term.”

That’s great to hear. And it’s nice that Yahoo’s new management has a new buzzword. But, really, who cares? Crucial executives are still fleeing the Yahoo “ecosystem.” Google is still eroding it. And in the end, its most recognizable feature is still the company’s deteriorating financial performance.