The World Wide World: IT Ain't Just the Web ... - Cdn.oreilly.com

term thing. It’s how we keep and support the next generation of engineers and the
next wave of invention.”
But he’s no starry-eyed idealist: “Suppose, say, Hewlett-Packard hired McKinsey to
help figure this out. IBM would immediately be suspicious. We play a useful role as
the outsider, the unifying force. No one is going to suspect us of trying to help HP.
But if we can get the industry together as a whole to sponsor a relief fund, to provide
some kind of cheap, general unemployment and retraining insurance....”In short,
he’s up to his usual tricks – and challenging the industry itself to come up with a
solution. “If you guys can invent phones that let me surf the Net, take pictures,
download music, and GPS my way around LA, surely you can figure out how to give
your employees the security and skills they need to survive in an industry that
changes at warp speed. You figure out how to do it, and we’ll give you the arm-twisting
to get it generally accepted.”
Jerry Yang, Yahoo!: Happy birthday! My how you have grown. . .
Although Jerry Yang and David Filo started Yahoo! with modest ambitions ten years
ago, Yang says, “We always assumed that it was a global business. Any undertaking on
the Internet is inherently global. We weren’t a local bank serving a five-block radius.”
The underlying model has morphed over the years (SEE RELEASE 1.0, JANUARY 2003),
but Yahoo! has always had a focus on content. In the early days, Filo and Yang were
the editors themselves, annotating and classifying a list of bookmarks. For better or
worse, it was not (just) a search engine. The company now has a profusion of different
content, communications, and commerce services ranging from online news to
messenger to Web-hosting for small businesses and online job boards; it also offers
personalization, RSS tools and various other “community” functions.
Over the last couple of years, since the arrival of CEO Terry Semel and COO Dan
Rosensweig, the company has started integrating these capabilities more tightly,
offering a more seamless experience for users and a more pleasant experience for
advertisers, the source of roughly 80 percent of its revenues. Many of its current
management team are former CEOs or senior executives of companies that Yahoo!
bought, such as Ted Meisel from Overture and chief product officer Geoff Ralston
from Four11 – no mean achievement in the quick-turn Bay Area. Now Yahoo! also
wants to be a more accommodating partner for developers: “We see ourselves as a
platform, not just a destination,” says Yang. “And for us, search is not something in
itself, but something that can enrich our content or enhance our services.”
6 RELEASE 1.0 WWW.RELEASE1-0.COM