It’s an exciting, strange, and, for Yahoo’s sake, hopefully encouraging piece of news: Steve Jobs gave the search engine company’s executives a pep talk.
Steve Jobs Inspires Yahoo
Exciting, because Steve Jobs is Steve Jobs – a wildly successful person who hasn’t always been so fortunate. You can imagine how this would be relevant to a company like Yahoo, and Kara Swisher, who covered the meeting, writes that Jobs “is apparently now Silicon Valley’s equivalent of Oprah.”
Strange, because Jobs isn’t directly connected to Yahoo. Wouldn’t motivation from Jerry Yang or Susan Decker have been more appropriate? Having Jobs speak at a Yahoo rally makes me think of having Alexander Nevsky, instead of William Wallace, lead the Scots in “Braveheart.”
Also, Swisher says that the audience was composed of “300-plus top Yahoo executives (vice president and above).” I’m far from an expert on corporate culture, but that seems like a lot of people.
In any case, Jobs evidently did some good work, and the rest of Yahoo’s daylong get-together went well, too. Now we’ll just have to see if the event has any lasting results.
