NY Times as Yahoo Armchair CEO for Jerry Yang

The New York Times columnist Joe Nocera gives Jerry Yang a good talking down to in this week's "Talking Business" column titled, "Oh Jerry, It’s No Longer Your Baby". Lots of smug armchair CEO pretend-you-know-best blather here. Nocera may believe he understands search - but his expertise is corporate business affairs.

While it may seem like a sort of fun exercise in word play which treats a major CEO as a poor dumb shortsighted child, it is far more powerful when published in an International publication like the New York Times.Yang could be ousted by the board Monday morning because Nocera has verbally abused him (and therefore Yahoo) on that very big stage. So while Jerry can take his billions and retire comfortably as suggested in the column - Nocera can grin and gloat that he spoke his mind.

Yahoo search may be brought to it's knees if they have yet another leadership change before they can get down to business accomplishing all the things initiated under Yang in the past year since he took over for Terry Semel. I've liked what I've seen since Yang took over (despite the massive distraction of fending off Microsoft for 5 months). Give the man some time to implement those ideas and prove the value of his new initiatives.

I've said here on several occasions that I believe the new Yahoo Open Strategy (YOS) will have a hugely positive effect on the company and strongly believe that the new "Social" Yahoo is promising beyond all previous initiatives there.

Now that Ballmer and company have stopped, we can only hope that the proxy fight promised by Icahn will be dropped and if smug columnists who would run a major corporation remotely from their office 3000 miles away would back off and stay out of the mix - perhaps Jerry could do his job.

I see YOS as the best hope for massive success for Yahoo and not one person at Microsoft, nor nasty corporate raiders, nor smug columnists has any concept of how powerful an idea it is. They need to stop trying to bomb and burn down the house of Yahoo and give Jerry some space.