This is why Silicon Hutong is in my daily reading. He takes the news about Yang speaking at the Hua Yuan Science & Technology Association meeting (it was 2 years ago at this same event that Jack Ma and Jerry Yang discussed the $1 bil. Alibaba-Yahoo! China partnership) and properly breaks it down for all of us.
First, he [Yang] decided to sneak Yahoo! into China - take the stealth approach, as it were. That worked so well that Yahoo! was stomped by local players like Sina, Sohu, and Netease who did not feel compelled to fly low and avoid the radar.
Then, he got talked into having Yahoo! buy local search engine 3721 and turning over Yahoo! China's future to the control of 3721's mercurial founder. Eighteen months and over $100 million later, that imploded, and Yahoo!'s position in China had slid even further.
Finally, he handed the China business and $1 billion to Alibaba. That hasn't failed yet, but the jury is definitely still out. Yahoo! China has apparently fallen to a distant third in the search engine rankings behind Google and Baidu. Yahoo!'s Chinese landing page looks like a rip-off of Google's, so there is no pretense of competition with the portals anymore.
Any other executive with a similar track record would have been reassigned, if not fired, long ago.
And now Jerry wants Yahoo! China to be in the advertising exchange business.
Is anybody at Yahoo! the least bit concerned?
Silicon Hutong: When Jerry Yang Talks China, Run for the Doors.
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