Closer To The Ideal

A very interesting post by I Am El Gringo:

For the time-constrained, I submit to you the results of my highly scientific research:

• Yahoo: Minimal Use of tables. I found a picture of Hugh Downs horizontally aligned with it’s caption in a table
• Google Home Page: Not only does Google use tables for it’s iconic home page, it embeds styling in the <td> tags. The horror.
• YouTube: Uses tables for of layout of videos
• Windows Live: Uses tables for footer layout
• MSN: There is one table, but it’s only for stockquotes which is tabular data
• MySpace Semantically pure. MySpace. Whoda thunk it
• Facebook: Does form layout with tables
• Blogger: No tables anywhere on the front page
• Orkut All tables all the time
• Rapidshare: A table with a single <td> for header placement. And again a single <td> table for the central “browse” section. Tsk tsk
• Microsoft: Navigation bar is a table. What did you expect? Unicorns and rainbows?
• Google India: It’s the same Google layout. I wonder if they used copy and paste for the template?
• Ebay: Tables, tables every where
• Hi5: Tables for every thing, pretty much. BTW, I didn’t even know this site existed until last week. Alexa rank 14!?
• Photobucket: Tables for photo gallery layout
• AOL: AOL’s layout is semantically pure! Friggin AOL?
• Google UK: Same GOOG layout. I’m now sure the copied an pasted their html
• Amazon: Now that’s just silly
• IMDB: They used tables for their 3 column layout. What! No CSS framework?
• Imageshack: Semantically pure as the driven snow.
• Finally, even though it’s not on Alexa’s top 20, log in to your Gmail account and look at
  the use of tables

My Hypothesis: Pure CSS design == overcompensation

So, the five companies that use CSS are the web powerhouses–MSN, MySpace, Blogger, AOL and Imageshack. MSN, MySpace and AOL have been maligned for years throughout the web savvy community. My hypothesis is that these companies are overcompensating for the crap that they’ve taken thoughtout the years by designing their site in pure CSS.

Other companies that have more web street-cred like Google and Facebook don’t really have to worry about how the web design community sees them. This leads to things like Google making extensive use of inline styling on their homepage instead of putting it in their stylesheet. I’ve never heard anyone claim that the Google folks are slouches at the web design/development thing. Why is that?

Sarah Lacy thinks Carol Bartz is a great choice for Yahoo:

“Bartz was the chief executive of AutoDesk, a sleepy little software company that she transformed into one of the fastest-growing, most profitable companies in the software space, even amid the post-2000 crash.

…But anyone can look at the CV and truth be told, it doesn’t tell you much about Bartz as a leader, which is what Yahoo needs more than anything right now. We all can name CEOs who appeared to be geniuses, but subsequently fell from grace when the going got tough. Maybe the company was just hitting a tailwind; maybe she was surrounded by a great staff; maybe she was in the right job at the right time and it made her look good.
Nope. In this case, it’s at least a good percentage Bartz.

I covered AutoDesk for BusinessWeek, and watched as the company sprung from obscurity based not on being the sexy technology of the day, but on strong operating results and stock appreciation. I did the exclusive interview with her for the magazine when she retired– a shock and disappointment to nearly everyone at the time.

…Her manner was as unadorned as her outfit. In fact, she’d planned on dressing up in a nice suit, but that morning her daughter was in the throws of teen angst and Bartz said she just needed to “hang with her” rather than using her time to put on the CEO-facade of suit, coiffed hair, sensible-but-feminine-shoes and makeup. There were no talking points, certainly no PR chaperones, and she answered nearly every question I put to her, even the uncomfortable ones. Well, everything except what she was doing next, and whether she might wind up in another CEO slot one day. If it was an act, it was a brilliant act.

In ten years of being a reporter, I found her unlike any other tech CEO at that level, especially highly-guarded female CEOs like Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina. She’s not veneered. She’s unafraid to talk about her role in the industry as a woman. She says something conclusive when she speaks, not a lukewarm point to please everyone. She gets tech, has a backbone, and most important, is a leader who pumps people up.

Everything I’ve heard about Bartz so far has sounded positive. The simple fact that she wants to keep the company independent and whole is a good sign.

In 1993 when Lou Gerstner took over as CEO of IBM many people thought he could increase value for shareholders by splitting IBM up and selling off the pieces. Instead, he generated a great deal of wealth by finding the right way to make IBM’s disparate parts work together. The word “synergy” is overused, but certainly applies to IBM during the 90s. The whole was greater than the parts. 

More so,  Gerstner had no background in tech. Instead, he had been one of IBM’s biggest customers (as CEO of Nabisco), and it was his perspective as a customer that allowed him to clearly see IBM’s greatest strength. He knew that Nabisco found it easier to get all they needed from IBM, rather than shopping around RFPs to a dozen different tech companies. So he knew that IBM’s greatest strength was as a unified whole.

What I’m hoping for, where Bartz is concerned, is something similar. Yahoo needs a leader who realizes its strength as  a whole.

Susan Mernit quotes Mark Cuban:

Yahoo has a very simple business. Generate traffic and monetize it. It generates traffic through services and content. It sells advertising around them both. Their strategy should be to acquire every and any company that makes their traffic, services, content or monetization stronger.”

And then offers some very good advice herself:

This is a very good strategy and a good suggestion. Problem is Yahoo! needs executives–and engineering leadership–who can a) make decisions on what to acquire and b) actually use the acquisition. Unfortunately, Yahoo!, like many big companies, has a history of acquiring companies and then not taking good advantage of the audience, product or IP they bring. Once Yahoo! has some new leadership in place–and resigns itself that putting 800 engineers on one project may not always be the saving grace some people thought it was–this strategy is a perfectly valid way to go, especially if they are prepared to bring in additional people to manage to this approach.

I’m not sure how many times I’ve looked at this page without seeing this typo:

I assume that:

“Create a signature that automatically added to your emails”

is suppose to read:

“Create a signature that is automatically added to your emails”

I always find it surprising to find typos on a major site like Yahoo.