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Friday, June 27, 2008

A Garlinghouse Memorial: BoomTown Decodes the Infamous “Peanut Butter Manifesto”

Now that he’s officially–well, Yahoo has not said so, but it is so–leaving the company this later summer, what say we blame Brad Garlinghouse for all the woes of Yahoo!

After all, Garlinghouse’s infamous “Peanut Butter Manifesto” was the key Ur-moment that one could point to as the one in which the curtains were pulled back at the troubled Internet company to reveal, well, a very sticky mess.

The 2006 internal document, penned by the Yahoo senior vice president, essentially unfairly impugned delicious peanut butter by using it as a metaphor for Yahoo spreading its resources too thinly.

So, as a memorial to the Garlinghouse era, BoomTown decodes the manifesto.

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Thursday, June 26, 2008

More on Yahoo’s Reorg: Dietzen Is Garlinghouse Replacement

As BoomTown reported last night, the Yahoo reorganization will be unveiled later this morning, with the slate of execs that this column outlined last week in its gory–oops, I mean, glorious–detail.

Sources said a more substantial public announcement has been pushed by Yahoo’s board–apparently, an internal email to employees was considered too–to show Yahoo’s new team and that the company still has a strong bench, despite a lot of exec departures of late.

Some more news: Yahoo will name Scott Dietzen to take over the job of SVP Brad Garlinghouse, running all communications and community properties and products under Patel.

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Monday, January 7, 2008

Kara Visits CES: Jerry Yang Emails It In

How glad BoomTown was to finally see Jerry Yang up close and personal, after our valiant but futile efforts to get near the Yahoo co-founder and CEO in 2007.

No, we’re not stalking him in a restraining-order kind of way, although I did stake a claim to a front row seat in the intimate theater at the Las Vegas Hilton for his keynote this morning at the Consumer Electronics Show, where Yang couldn’t help but see me.

Like he cared!

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Friday, January 4, 2008

Kara Visits Zimbra!

When BoomTown broke the news that Yahoo was paying $350 million for open-source email and calendaring company Zimbra back in September, it was clear it was not a middling move on the part of the Internet giant, which too often can act like a mouse when it comes to acquisitions.

In fact, the innovative Zimbra and [...]

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Monday, September 24, 2007

The GigaOm Show’s Interview With Zimbra’s Satish Dharmaraj

This week Om Malik and his co-host, Joyce Kim, interview Satish Dharmaraj of Zimbra, on the online GigaOM Show on Revision3.
It’s a nice get in the wake of the $350 million sale of the email start-up to Yahoo, a story we broke last week in this column here.
They also chat with VC Jeff [...]

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Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Yahoo’s Brad Garlinghouse on the $350 Million Zimbra Deal

Another day, another scoop we try to serve up honestly on BoomTown!

Yesterday, we broke the first news of the acquisition of Zimbra by Yahoo, after we had the first scoop last week of Yahoo’s purchase of BuzzTracker.
Those Yahoo dealmakers are certainly busy these days and we will continue to watch them oh-so-carefully.
Until then, here’s [...]

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BoomTown Went to the TechCrunch40 Conference and All You Get Is This Lousy Video

While we subjected our stalwart John Paczkowski of Digital Daily to the onerous and potentially mind-numbing task of live-blogging Jason Calacanis’s and Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch40 conference, BoomTown broke some news (on the Yahoo-Zimbra $350 million deal), wandered around and basically schmoozed.
In addition, cupcakes were had.
(The day also included a pricey payback lunch for a bet [...]

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Monday, September 17, 2007

Yahoo Buys Zimbra for $350 Million

Yahoo is set to make yet another acquisition–this time of white-label open-source email provider Zimbra. Sources close to the deal said that the Internet portal will pay $350 million, considerably upward of its most recent valuation, for the email and calendar provider.

Backed by Benchmark Partners, Redpoint Ventures and Accel Partners, San Mateo, Calif.-based Zimbra’s clients [...]

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About Kara

Kara Swisher started covering digital issues for The Wall Street Journal's San Francisco bureau in 1997 and also wrote the BoomTown column about the sector. With Walt Mossberg, she co-produces and co-hosts D: All Things Digital, a major high-tech and media conference. Read more »

Ethics Statement

Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.

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