That's because Murdock is the same guy who campaigned for the job of Apple CEO back in 1997, when Steve Jobs was only working as the company's interim chief. He emailed Jobs and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, a close friend of Jobs and an Apple board member at the time, to make his pitch. In a prank, Jobs and Ellison told Murdock he had the job. He later had to be told not to show up at Apple's campus.

I don't know if Yahoo should reject him so readily. Here's Murdock's bio:

Hi and welcome to the site. I wanted to take a moment and give you a bit of background on me and why I am here. I am a US NAVY DISABLED VETERAN. I got my start in computers in 1975/1976 and very early on saw the potential for these machines in our lives. It's amazing how far they've come from the days when we carried paper tape and then cassettes for data storage. Now that and more fits on a simple USB stick.

The power of the web like the computer systems amazed me when it was first unleashed to the public. I can remember sitting in my office at Pixar Animation Studios (when we were still named PIXAR) and thinking...this thing called a browser has some potential, one day people will use this like they use a newspaper. In fact, this will probably replace newspapers.

See? Total visionary. Under Yang, Yahoo has been busy making deals with newspapers rather than predicting their doom. Murdock might be a better CEO than Yang, at the least — and that, sadly, is no joke.

A video from Murdock on Yang's departure:

Apple, where cofounder Steve Jobs returned to power in 1998, is up 600 percent since the beginning of 2002. Amazon.com, where Jeff Bezos has reigned as CEO more or less uninterruptedly since the online retailer's founding, tripled its worth. Google, where cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin form a troika with hired-hand CEO Eric Schmidt, has also tripled in value since its inital public offering in 2004. These gains remain despite the stock market's punishing fall.

What about Yahoo, eBay, and Microsoft, where founders handed over the company to professional managers? They are all back where they started almost seven years ago. Under former CEO Terry Semel, Yahoo had a brief golden age in 2004, where it outperformed all the other big Internet companies; it ended just as Google began its relentless rise. Meg Whitman overstayed her welcome at eBay, presiding over its stagnation before handing over the CEO job to John Donahoe — like Whitman, also a management consultant by training. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has proven that he's no Bill Gates; the stock has flatlined under his leadership.

Under Yang, the stock has gone down, down, down, interrupted only by the hope that Microsoft might buy the company and in so doing, give its employees the leadership and sense of purpose they so desperately crave. Does that disprove the value of founders? No. Rather, it suggests that by abandoning his company when it was merely a toddler to be reared by strangers, that he was never much of a father figure to begin with.

Experience is underrated in Silicon Valley. Novices are thought to do better than old hands. But the truth is that the intensity of actually running a startup — raising money, hiring people, assembling desks by hand — is better training than that provided by most business schools.

Looked at that way, Yang gave up way too early, hiring a professional CEO when the company only had five employees. A graduate-school dropout, Yang had no management experience, and no predilection for the task. He is still, to this day, famously indecisive and fatally nice.

Steve Jobs has rarely spoken about the heartbreaking experience of being cast out of Apple, the company he cofounded. In June 2005, though, he gave a commencement speech at Stanford University and openly discussed it. "I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me," he said. "The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life."

Yang's exit, like his entrance, is far too soft. He will remain CEO until the board finds a replacement; he will remain Chief Yahoo after that. Such kid-gloves treatment does him no favors.

For his own good, Yahoo should exile Yang, as Apple did with Jobs, and give him a chance, at last, to prove himself. His golf score may suffer; his nights may prove sleepless. But they say tough economic times are when the best companies are born. Perhaps he'll correct the mistakes he made at Yahoo with his next company. And maybe — if there's still a Yahoo left to welcome him back, if it hasn't been swallowed up by Microsoft or News Corp. or AT&T — he'll return to his first company a conquering hero. And prove that Silicon Valley's tale of the prodigal founder isn't so mythical.

Both have claimed they are engineers without receiving degrees in the field. Steve Jobs discovered marijuana and LSD as a teenager, and Elon Musk named his Dragon spaceship after the tune, "Puff the Magic Dragon" (only because people concluded he was smoking it while coming up with such far-out ideas about space).

Could the "reality distortion field" be an effect of nature's best-smelling herbs? Do either of them have a California medical marijuana card? Have you ever thought of replacing every *i*product with *high*product?

HighPod, HighBook, HighSight, HighPhone.

Cook is paid more than anyone else at Apple, and he's the only executive allowed an outside board seat (Cook is a director at Nike). More importantly, he's humble enough not to push for a CEO job that can never be his as long as Jobs is in the saddle.

True, Cook is an operations expert, not a product genius like Jobs, but he could surround himself with Apple executives like Scott Forstall and Jonathan Ive to make up for that lack. Only one wild card: Mark Papermaster, the IBM chip executive whose recruitment by Apple has embroiled the companies in a lawsuit. if the hire goes through, Papermaster will report to Jobs, not Cook.

• Steve Jobs, ailing Apple CEO
• Kara Swisher, obnoxious AllThingsD blogger
• Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO
• Michael Arrington, TechCrunch editor
• Jerry Yang, Yahoo's undead CEO

How to wear it: Black mock turtleneck, blue jeans, and an iPhone.

How to scare them: Find an Apple shareholder. Clutch your stomach and groan.

Next: Kara Swisher, obnoxious AllThingsD blogger

It reads, "Have a passion for really great products!" The exclamation point kills it for me. Add to that: He's not even in Facebook's Apple network. His wife, Laurene Powell-Jobs, and his daughter Lisa Brennan-Jobs both have Facebook profiles, and they aren't on his friends list. Sadly, 75 Apple employees, drawn to any electronic hint of their cult leader, are.

I'm left wishing Dan Lyons had been the one to pull this stunt. The original Fake Steve Jobs would have made this Facebook page so convincing I would have believed it. And gladly.

Remember the original Walkman? The first Vaio? These days, Sony products don't threaten Steve Jobs. They irritate him. Even Sony knows their stuff's not cool. Look at the photos on their home page: James Bond. Pink. "Try to solve the mystery of the Passengers ... Save the world from bad music." No product shots except a thumbnail-size Playstation HD shoved in the lower right corner. I'm sure the focus group loved it. But to a gearhead like me it screams, "I'm Sony. Please kill me."

• This month, a French newspaper reported Mac Pro desktops might cause cancer.
• The iPhone 3G charger cord is a fire hazard and it's being recalled.
• In 2007, iPod Nanos began bursting into flames.
• Apple CEO Steve Jobs admitted MobileMe wasn't ready for launch when Apple began pushing it on customers.
• In 2006, some MacBooks also burst into flames. They also discolored after little use and continue to crack.

(Photo via Ars Technica)

A release announcement on October 14th would make sense to introduce products after the back-to-school season, when the company empties a lot of shelves. And Apple cleared a lot of inventory, according to NPD, with the researchers reporting that one in five notebooks sold in July and August were from Apple. Neither that news nor new product rumors have done much for the stock price, which hasn't recovered from Monday's steep drop.

(Photos by Lode Vermeiren)

• Steve Ballmer
• Mitchell Baker
• Jeff Bezos
• Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt
• Jeff Clavier
• Paul Graham
• Arianna Huffington
• Joi Ito
• Steve Jobs
• Jonathan Kaplan
• Loic Le Meur
• Jack Ma
• Matt Mullenweg
• Rupert Murdoch
• Craig Newmark
• Gabe Rivera
• Kevin Rose
• Sheryl Sandberg
• Jon Stewart
• Peter Thiel
• Maria Thomas
• Anssi Vanjoki
• Jimmy Wales
• Evan Williams
• Jerry Yang

Young Steve Jobs, Apple cofounder:

Jobs, older and thinner:

Young Bill Gates, Microsoft CEO:

Old Bill Gates, philanthropist:

Young Eric Schmidt, before he was Google's CEO:

Old Eric Schmidt:

Young Larry Ellison, Oracle CEO:

Old Larry Ellison:

Young Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen:

Not quite as young Ning cofounder Marc Andreessen:

Only one man has escaped the effects of time. That is, of course, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer:

Lyons says he had intended to bring The Secret Diary to Newsweek, but lost heart after Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference in June, when it was apparent to all who saw him that the real Steve Jobs had lost a lot of weight.

So it wasn't because Newsweek ran afoul of Apple's top flack, Katie Cotton, in bringing Lyons on board, as the more conspiratorial rumors have suggested. Or it was, but then Lyons was introduced to Robot Steve Jobs and decided it was better to submit than resist the inevitable extinction of humanity at the hands of attractive, well-designed and verbally-abusive overlords from the Cupertino company. The reprogrammed Lyons now reports that Jobs looked better at the recent iPod Nano rollout event, and he may start blogging again.

(Photo by Mark Coggins)

I’m still trying to figure out why they held an actual event today instead of just putting out a press release. As a fellow filthy hack commented to me after the big show, “Can you imagine if Sony did this?” Nevertheless, there was much cheering and shouting and clapping and whooping, even though much of it came from Apple employees who had been instructed to remove their green event T-shirts so they’d look like regular members of the public. I’m not making that up. Friends, it’s true — Apple brings along its own employees and has them cheer like mad for their own products.

The story got big because hordes of tech reporters, including Goldman himself, noticed Jobs's sickly appearance at the iPhone 3G launch. Katie Cotton, who as best we can tell is Jobs's personal flack on Apple's payroll, tried to deal with them by telling them Jobs simply had a "common bug." It was an obvious lie and it only added mystery to an already juicy story Apple shareholders had every right to understand. If Jobs is looking to blame someone other than himself, Cotton makes a convenient target for his famous wrath.