When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. - Hunter S. Thompson

16 June 2008

We're dead, we're over, we're roadkill, we're AltaVista.

Look, I would never admit this to anyone in public, but the truth is that our deal with Google marks the end of the first great battle of the Internet era -- call it Internet 1.0 -- and we've lost. That's what it means. We've capitulated. We've surrendered. We're dead. We're over. We're roadkill. We're AltaVista. We're Lycos. We've admitted we can't survive on our own and have turned to our biggest enemy to save us. When they write the history of the Internet, Yahoo! might be more than a footnote, but not much more.

Sure, we'll try to spin it otherwise, but we won't have much luck because we're about as good at spinning as we are at running our company, which is to say, not very. Have you ever seen our PR people in action? Me either. Do we even have any PR people? I have no idea. Whatever we're paying them, it's 100% too much. Who else could go into a PR battle against Microsoft and come out looking like the low-IQ side of the equation? Honestly, I've never ever in my entire life seen an organization that handles marketing and public relations as badly as we do, except maybe Facebook, but that's only because they don't do anything at all. They don't even try.
The Secret Diary of [Steve Jobs] Jerry Yang: The first great battle of the Internet is over...

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