Tuesday, November 28, 2006

"I hate peanut butter. We all should"

Back in February I suggested that the old doublet of form and substance might be a useful way of laying out the differences between Yahoo and Google, and quoted Yahoo's Valla Vikili who had alluded to "death of meaning" in a presentation to some of my colleagues.

Well, meaning is definitely on its last legs in Brad Garlinghouse's now infamous Peanut Butter memo. With its dropped balls and short-term band-aids it represents such an apotheosis of the modern anti-style in Business, that I thought it might have been a pastiche when I first read it. But no, the Y he has shaved onto the back of his head really does stand for the old fashioned kind of yahoo.

Anyway, I wish them all the best of luck with focusing the vision and all the other rather violent sounding measures that the yellow and purple-blooded Garlinghouse proposes, like executing a radical reorganisation, killing redundancies and blowing up the matrix. (This last one can never be a bad thing.)

No comments: