Last Flickr of hope for Yang is gone

When Jerry Yang’s Yahoo! brought the photo-sharing website Flickr three years ago it looked like the start of a beautiful partnership. But now it’s all over. Having made $35m from the sale, the company’s founders, Stewart Butterfield and his wife Caterina Fake, have now “vested out”, another example of the brain drain that is effecting the troubled media giant.

It also doesn’t help that Butterfield chose to announce his resignation in a jokey email to Yahoo! vice-president Brad Garlinghouse, which has somehow found its way onto the internet. In it, he compares himself to a tin-metal worker whose skills are no longer required in a multinational conglomerate that spans aeronautical frames, brewing, consumer finance and casinos, a sledgehammer dig at the companies move away from its core business.

"As you know, tin is in my blood. When I joined Yahoo! back in 21 it was a sheet-tin concern of great momentum, growth and innovation. Over the decades, as the company grew and expanded, first into dies and punches, into copper, corrugated steel, synthesized rubber, piping, milling equipment, engines, instruments, weaponry and so on, I still felt at home, because tin was the core of the business. By the time of the internet revolution and our expansions into websites, I have been cast adrift. I tried to roll with the times, but nary a sheet of tin has rolled off our own production lines in 30 years!"

Some might read this as a sign of some form of breakdown, however its light tone belies a very serious point. Having seen off an unwanted take-over approach from Microsoft earlier this year, and clinched a crucial deal with the dominant search engine, Google, Jerry Yang now faces an exodus of potentially catastrophic proportions.

Butterfield and his wife are a particularly big loss, having been the two pinups of the so-called Web 2.0 movement, the generation of dotcom entrepreneurs which includes Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and the British creators of rival Bebo, who decided that helping people communicate with each other online was more important than trying to sell them something.
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