Don't Cry for Terry Semel, He's Still Got His Jet

We are in the Lounge at JFK, waiting for our 8 pm flight to Bologna. Time to read the NY Times and find out more about Terry Semel's departure as head of Yahoo. I wrote about him a few months ago, and it didn't take a fortune teller to predict that the former Warner Bros. executive was bound to lose his corner office soon. After Wired wrote a piece that basically said that Semel didn't understand or appreciate the complexities of the web, and after Yahoo's Panama ad service didn't make their stock go up, what else was going to happen?

The story in the Times mentioned that Semel has collected $451 million in salary and stock benefits so far. So how noble it was of him to forego the additional $92 million he would have received if he stayed another three years.

The most salient point in the story was made by a stock analyst. He said that with the score so dominated by Google in search, there was no way that Yahoo would not try to merge with a bigger player like Microsoft or AOL. "My bet: Yahoo wont' be an independent company in 12 months."