If Yahoo! buys Hulu it will be plunged into a nasty, long-running fight between media companies and distributors—not the sort of thing a Silicon Valley firm is used to handling. Probably better to stay clear. Schumpeter, The Economist - “Beware the Hulu hoodoo”

It’s been a long time. http://www.flickr.com/photos/shanan/73598418/

Turning to my day job – I’m going to be moderating a panel at Add-on-Con this Friday with Patrick Murphy from Brand Thunder and Adam Boyden from Conduit. We’re going to be talking about how publishers, OEMs, hardware vendors, and others can use browser Add-ons to generate revenue, or otherwise add value to their products. A lot of the buzz will be about Google finally adding extensions to the Beta of Chrome.

As a product manager it is tempting to blame failures on the action - or inaction - of others. This is dangerous because it allows one to avoid responsibility for the commtiments they make. To be a great product manager you have to be a good leader. That means holding yourself accountable. The best definition of accountability I’ve seen describes accountability as “a personal choice to rise above one’s circumstances and demonstrate the ownership necessary for achieving desired results (Connors, Smith and Hickman, ‘The Oz Principle’).

For all my time at Yahoo I’ve had the good fortune of working under Tapan Bhat. I worked for him directly for the first year as we tried to sort out My Yahoo!. “My” was and is a pretty geeky product, with a lot of power user features. Our job was to figure out how to turn it into a mass market product. Having it for several years before abandoning it I felt that I had a great sense of what users wanted in a “personalized home page,” and what we needed to do to make the product grow again.