Might Jerry Yang, despite all the doubts about the new chief exec's credentials, succeed in his ambition to "accelerate execution" at Yahoo? It's hard to tell, because Jerry Yang, one of the internet giant's founders, has had no management responsibilities since the Sunnyvale company's early days. But there is one clue, from Jerry's Fund, a budget set aside for Yang to allocate to ideas which take his fancy. (Think of it as a cross between Google Labs and Saddam Hussein's presidential guard.) Let's be charitable and assume simply that Yang, pictured here extricating himself from a fat suit, didn't have the authority to bring his pet projects, apart from Yahoo Answers, to market. Because the uncharitable verdict, from commenter snidelywhiplash, is that Jerry's Fund was a failure.

Very few things come out of Jerry's Fund projects because it's a process that's designed to fail. When something gets funded, it automatically becomes so overly meddled-in by execs wanting to "show off" for Jerry that it becomes a morass of political maneuvering and internecine battling such that very little gets accomplished.

Sometimes the project will also get hijacked by executives, either to turn them into whatever they think will advance their existing projects, and the projects have even occasionally been looted just to fund a new head or two with no intention of letting them work seriously on the original project.

Finally, because Jerry's Fund is only typically enough funding for a one-year project (seldom long enough to get anything meaningful accomplished), it falls to the department where the project is based to then commit to funding the project in future years, something they're seldom interested in doing because the project is not usually anything that they understand or care about.

These add up to Jerry's Fund being a waste of money, and Jerry's Kids get a crash course in bureaucratic bullshit and corporate backstabbing, sending them fleeing to other companies where innovation isn't sucked dry by bureaucracy.

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