Yahoo! is a great company, but one which can do no right lately.

Yahoo Sr. VP Jerry Maguire Brad Garlinghouse seemingly leaked a critical memo now dubbed the “peanut butter manifesto“. He called for radical change in the company.

It’s generating more heat than light.

Even I’m ticked off by his hint of merging awesome flickr with lousy Yahoo Photos. Yahoo! owns both products.

Flickr isn’t just technology. Yes, it’s a great UI with a killer back-end and open APIs. But it’s communities. It’s a sense of place. It’s love. …

I have almost 13,000 pictures on Flickr. I love the company, the people who created it, the fact that they don’t think they own my data, that they have open APIs, and that they have created, single-handedly, with no patents and no (or little if any) IP, a whole new market ecosystem for digital photography. A big high-five and a toast to that.

As a photographer, I have a relationship with Flickr. Not with Yahoo. That’s not to say I don’t have relationships with Yahoo, or that I don’t respect Yahoo. I have lots of relationships with Yahoo, and lots of respect for the company. But my relationship with Flickr predates and transcends my relationships with Yahoo. (In fact, I hate the clunky way I was forced to “merge” the logins for both.)

The Doc Searls Weblog : Monday, November 20, 2006

Whatever happened to Jerry Maguire’s Manifesto, anyway?