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February 11, 2008
yahoo: what does jerry yang have against capitalization?
What does Yahoo's Jerry Yang have against capitalization? His email letter to fellow Yahoo employees reads like it was written by e.e. cummings on a blackberry.
as you'll see from the news release we issued today, our board of directors has reviewed microsoft's unsolicited proposal with yahoo!'s management, financial and legal advisors. after a careful evaluation, the board has unanimously concluded that the proposal is not in the best interests of yahoo! and our stockholders. of course, the board of directors is continuously evaluating all of its strategic options in the context of the rapidly evolving industry environment and we remain committed to pursuing initiatives that maximize value for stockholders
Next thing you know he'll eliminate punctuation andtheninterwordspaces. And then ... well, it's anarchy, anarchy I tell you!
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It's funny, I was thinking about Yang's refusal to use capital letters the other day. In some ways it's a metaphor for Yahoo's fall from grace.
Remember around the time of the first dot-com boom everyone started using lowercase letters for everything, you know, because it was cool and anti-establishment? Jerry Yang still believes Yahoo! can return to those good old days.
I think he does it as a way of signaling informality -- that he's just a "regular guy." Daniel Gibbons is right, this was more common back when -- but some people still do it as a way of showing they're being casual.
It's more IM-like than email-like.
Or, maybe he's just too busy to be bothered with the shift key.
dear fellow yahoos,
we have grown bigger and fatter than we need to be. we spend a lot of money where other companies don't. that means less returns to our shareholders. so, unfortunately we have to cut back. that may mean you won't have a job in the near future. i'm sorry to tell you that. please don't be angry with me or the management at yahoo. we might be in the same boat.
sincerely,
jerry
ps. i might start to use capitalization on my next job. but for now, i'm sticking to my principles.
it's also possible that he has some form of rsi or carpal so he wants to minimize use of the shift key every so often ...
Perhaps he wants to show that Yahoo can do without not only Microsoft's capital, but anything capital at all.
We covered this in-depth on the internal discussion boards of Yahoo! and the participants divided into two camps:
1) It's informal, disrespectful, and inappropriate for the CEO of a major corporation to act like a texting tweenager; or
2) It's Jerry's (excuse me, jerry's) "personal brand," which allows him to form emotional bonds with each employee.
In any case, he has to strive to get that effect, as Entourage actively capitalizes the beginnings of sentences.
A period would hurt anyone either...guess he didnt learn about caps or run-on sentences.