After pocketing $452 Million in salary, bonuses and stock options since 2001, and having little to show, other than a steady decline in market share and the worst paid search management service in history, Terry Semel finally resigned from his post as CEO of Yahoo! today.
Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo! will replace Terry Semel at the helm.
Semel’s resignation does not come as a surprise to many in the industry, as rumblings had already been heard over the past couple of weeks about the board’s discontent with his work. Funnily enough, the official announcement was greeted with undertones of jubilation across the blogosphere!
While it is true that he hasn’t helped Yahoo! win any market share from Google in a very long time, in spite of launching a “revolutionary” pay per click advertising platform earlier this year, one could argue that it wasn’t his fault alone. The entire corporation is rubbish!
Take for example, the simple task of uploading new listings to the Yahoo! Search Marketing platform in the UK. The easy version of the process involved downloading a spreadsheet, populating it with values, emailing it to Yahoo! Search Marketing, waiting for them to access their email, then waiting for editorial approval, then receiving a “declined” notice for a variety of meaningless reasons, arguing with a less than intelligent account representative and trying to make them understand that just because row 1 and 2 in the spreadsheet did not meet editorial approval does not give the editor grounds for just declining the rest of the spreadsheet and so on…..
In comparison, on Google, the process of adding new keywords or optimising ad copy consists of basically logging into the system and making the change!
At this point in time, Yahoo! looks a lot like a sinking ship with a few sailors putting up a brave fight to pump the water (Google) out faster than it pulls them down. Given the aphalling level of service and lacklustre systems they produce, few would mourn the loss of the company as a whole, let alone the loss of just their insignificant CEO.
