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Linked List: November 30, 2006

Thursday, 30 November 2006

Who Should Be CEO of Yahoo? 

Nick Denton:

So, to the speculation that Sue Decker, CFO of Yahoo, is being lined up to succeed Terry Semel as boss of the aimless internet giant: it’s a pleasant daydream, for various reasons I’ll go into, and a really misconceived idea. What Yahoo needs to do is to hire a product nazi.

I’ve said it before and will say it again: the CEO of any company needs to live and breathe the products and services the company creates. That’s why Steve Jobs is a great CEO for Apple: he understands and loves Apple’s products. The problem with Terry Semel is simply that he’s not a web guy, and Yahoo is the prototypical web company. I don’t think replacing him with a CFO changes that equation at all.

I’m not saying it is (or isn’t) a realistic possibility, but my pick for Yahoo CEO would be Caterina Fake. I know, all she does is run little ol’ Flickr, but Flickr is the best product Yahoo owns. Not the most popular, not the most profitable, but the best. Almost everything Yahoo does ought to be more like Flickr in some ways. Read this interview with Fake in .Net magazine and tell me she doesn’t completely understand the web.

On Calling Bullshit 

Dan Froomkin:

What is it about Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert that makes them so refreshing and attractive to a wide variety of viewers (including those so-important younger ones)? I would argue that, more than anything else, it is that they enthusiastically call bullshit.

Exactamundo.

2,000-Year-Old Greek Astronomical Device Was More Complex Than Anything Known to Have Been Created for Another 1,000 Years 

Traveling through hyperspace ain’t like dusting crops, boy. Without precise calculations, we’d fly right through a star, or bounce too close to a supernova, and that would end your trip real quick, wouldn’t it?

For $150, Third-World Laptop Stirs Big Debate 

I’m a big fan of the One Laptop Per Child project. I know that people in the third world need all sorts of other things, too — clean water, medicine, food — but these computers can do something wonderful: tap into human potential.

Ad Spot for December in The Deck 

A little birdie tells me that there’s still an open slot in the December line-up for The Deck, and that my good friend and Deck honcho Jim Coudal will make a special deal for first-time advertisers.

U.S. Currency Discriminates Against Blind, Judge Rules 

Considering the numerous currency redesigns in the past few years, it really is inexplicable that the U.S. Treasury Department hasn’t addressed this in some way.

Another Developer in Europe Frets Over the Sinking Dollar 

Alastair Houghton:

Most normal people don’t really care about the exchange rates. Unfortunately, however, I’m running a software business from the United Kingdom, and a large proportion of my customers are in the United States. That makes my business extremely sensitive to the exchange rate; the difference in takings caused by exchange rate fluctuations can be literally thousands of pounds. I really can see the difference it’s making to my bottom line… my company has to sell up to 14% more in order to make the same money it was making this time last year!

Hivelogic Redesign 

I very much like this new design by Dan Benjamin, for three reasons:

  1. It’s just one column.
  2. It’s typeset entirely in a single font family.
  3. There are no needless boxes or rules.

There are very few web site designs that do a single one of those; Dan’s does all three. The CSS stylesheet is a thing of beauty as well.

In Praise of Third Place 

James Surowiecki on Nintendo’s place in the console market:

Nintendo, though, has not just survived out of the spotlight; it has thrived. It has five billion dollars in the bank from years of solid profits, and this past year, though it spent heavily on the launch of the Wii, it made close to a billion dollars in profit and saw its stock price rise by sixty-five per cent. Sony’s game division, by contrast, barely eked out a profit and Microsoft’s reportedly lost money. Who knew bringing up the rear could be so lucrative?

If you measure by profits instead of unit sales, Nintendo is in first place, not third.