As of this weekend, he is Yahoo’s best known senior vice president. Digging a little deeper into the mysteries of the spreader of the Peanut Butter Manifesto turns up someone whose background is something of a house of cards.
Kevin Kelleher at TheStreet.com did quite a job ripping into Garlinghouse in his lengthy column about the Man Who Would Save Yahoo!
Who is Brad Garlinghouse? He’s the Internet’s own Charlie Brown, a Yahoo! senior vice president prone to griping about peanut butter…
Under his watch, Yahoo! Messenger let a huge opportunity for voice-over-Internet protocol, or VoIP, slip through its fingers as eBay snapped up Skype. And Yahoo Mail dropped behind Google’s Gmail as the most prestigious Web-based email domain.
Earlier, Garlinghouse was CEO of VoIP leader Dialpad, which promptly spiraled into bankruptcy, but not before Garlinghouse laid off 90 of his 140 employees.
Before Dialpad, Garlinghouse was a venture capital investor at CMGI, one of the most spectacular dot-com blowouts. Its stock has fallen from $164 in 2000 to $1.40 today.
Maybe Garlinghouse shouldn’t get the nod as the next CEO once the embattled Terry Semel decides to move on, likely to the warm approval of Wall Street. Here’s a scenario: CFO Susan Decker slides into the CEO slot at Yahoo. Eric Schmidt takes the CEO reins at Apple while Steve Jobs moves over to be a chief software architect, in order to satisfy Apple shareholders angered at the stock backdating issue. Marissa Mayer steps up to the CEO slot at Google.
This would place women at the helm of the top two Internet companies in the world. Think it could happen?
Posted by David Utter
