Carl Icahnt

Yahoo's Management Exodus Could Be a Very Good Thing

Good riddance for most of them, I say.

Take Usama Fayyad, for example. He's peddled several companies owned by friends/extended family for Yahoo to buy out for overpriced sums of money. It wasn't too hard since his wife was the CTO's (Farzad Nassem) cousin. Then, after the acquisition, folks in the company wonder what the heck it was bought for.

Or, Brad Garlinghouse, do you really think he is responsible for Yahoo Mail/Messenger/etc being good? No, it was the engineers in those teams! He has plenty of failures under him too. The new Yahoo Mail was so slow for the first year, it convinced many Yahoo mail users to switch to Gmail. The new release of Yahoo Photos was even slower then the new Yahoo Mail (see the pattern), until it was canned. The only reason Brad was saved the embarrassment for that failure was the Search team purchased Flickr after Brad decided he didn't want it!

The Flickr folks it seems were only waiting for the last payout from their buyout to leave. Seems like a longtime plan.

From my sources inside the company, Qi Lu is a loss, but can you really expect people to work one place forever. I think he's worked there for 10 years or so.

Thanks Fred for a fair and insightful article.