Apple's (AAPL) Steve Jobs pumps up Yahoo! (YHOO) execs

Posted Oct 3rd 2007 11:19AM by Brian White
Filed under: Management, Yahoo! (YHOO), Apple Inc (AAPL)

Where is Yahoo, Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) headed these days? CEO Jerry Yang and President Sue Decker are in the middle of turning the internet giant back into a revenue leader after years of losing so many races to competitor Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG). Yahoo! still has the assets and the audience, which are 10 years in the making. What is doesn't have is the execution.

That was the message last Friday when Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) CEO and current king-of-everything Steve Jobs showed up to give some insight to a gathering of Yahoo! execs. His message was clear: like Apple of the past, Yahoo! has a great product portfolio and a world-class following of customers. What needs work is listening to customers and giving them solutions efficiently.

Only one thing stood out from the meeting: it was attended by 300 Yahoo! vice presidents. Three hundred? That right there tells me quite a bit if the number is right. Why on earth would Yahoo! need so many upper-level managers?

The term 'ecosystem' was bandied about by Yang throughout the meeting, and all the managers who showed up expecting a droll meeting apparently left energized and wowed by Jobs' talk. I mean, who could not leave starry-eyed when Jobs compared Yahoo! to Apple, arguably the hottest consumer tech company on the planet right now?

The message was delivered, and now Yahoo! has to find what it has lost in order to get its revenue and profits back on track. The only problem I see is that the market may not have the patience after years of poor performance under former CEO Terry Semel, who was hailed as the savior when he joined Yahoo! in 2001 only to let the company fester in its own incompetence.

Tags: AAPL, Apple CEO, AppleCeo, inthenews, Jerry Yang, JerryYang, Steve Jobs, SteveJobs, Sue Decker, SueDecker, Yahoo!, YHOO