Motorola Gets Yahooed
by Kara Swisher
Posted on July 12, 2007 at 1:43 AM PT
Eric Jackson, the effectively noisy shareholder advocate who prodded Terry Semel to leave Yahoo as CEO at its annual board meeting just days before he did, is now targeting Motorola and its CEO Ed Zander.
While Jackson runs a small operation, he uses his Web site, YouTube videos, posting to wikis and other online tools in his effort to build a small group of disgruntled investors and offer a “Plan B.”
Zander, who appeared at our D3 conference, might want to be careful. Jackson craftily asked Semel at the Yahoo meeting–see my post on it here and the video from it below–whether he had the “fire in the belly” to continue as CEO at the troubled Internet giant. At the meeting, Semel answered with a hearty yes, but was gone soon after.
As of yesterday, Jackson now has a lot more fodder in his fight with the telecommunications-equipment maker, when Motorola warned of weak shipments of cellphones and said its mobile-devices division would lose money for the year.
With the stock in the tank, management turmoil, a lackluster product line and rumors of a Zander exit, let us not forget the recent explosive launch of the iPhone to cause even more agita at the company.
But let Jackson take it from here with his recent video on Motorola, followed by mine from the Yahoo board meeting in June:
