Kara Swisher

Recent Posts by Kara Swisher

Video: The Cashmere Stylings of Yahoo Chief Product Officer Blake Irving

Yesterday, BoomTown spent a good part of the day at Yahoo’s HQ in Sunnyvale, Calif., meeting with various product execs and seeing some cool new stuff in the works.

I was impressed, as I had been several times over the many years I have covered the Silicon Valley Internet giant, where I have seen innovative efforts by the truckload.

That is, until they never saw the light of day, until some random teenaged entrepreneur got giant funding for the very same idea months later.

I put this question of failure to ship to Yahoo’s Chief Product Officer Blake Irving, who got to the company a little less than a year ago with the goal of shaking the place up.

Irving’s last job was as corporate VP of Microsoft’s Windows Live Platform group.

He left Microsoft several years ago, after 15 years, to spend time with his family and had been teaching at Pepperdine University.

Since he got to Yahoo, he’s certainly done some layoffs, restructuring and hiring–mostly from Microsoft–and now he is promising that there will be big changes in how Yahoo manages its product pipeline.

Here’s a longish video interview with Irving–who is a live wire, as you will see, as well as a wearer of soft and luxe candylicious sweaters–talking about this key issue, the search business, talent retention and more:

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Just as the atom bomb was the weapon that was supposed to render war obsolete, the Internet seems like capitalism’s ultimate feat of self-destructive genius, an economic doomsday device rendering it impossible for anyone to ever make a profit off anything again. It’s especially hopeless for those whose work is easily digitized and accessed free of charge.

— Author Tim Kreider on not getting paid for one’s work