If you're Jerry Yang, play that Stanford card for all its worth

If Jerry Yang does lose his job as the result of a deal between Yahoo and Microsoft, the Stanford connection may prove its worth.

(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET News.com)

"Jerry is very talented and if he wants to work at Google we'd be very excited to have him, but I don't think that's going to happen," the BBC quoted Google co-founder (and fellow Stanford alum) Sergey Brin. He was responding to a question whether Google would ever consider employing Yang if Yahoo's chief executive lost his job.

Brin is huddling this week with the other two-thirds of Google's top leaders in Hertfordshire, England, for the company's European "Zeitgeist" meeting. Eric Schmidt later told reporters that he would meet with Brin and Larry Page to digest news of Microsoft's renewed interest in Yahoo and decide on Google's next move. (Maybe we'll hear something soon on a follow to Yahoo's apparently successful pilot of Google's search advertising technology.)

It's not entirely idle speculation. OK, there's a little of that going on. But if Yang wanted to make his next home at the Googleplex post-Yahoo, why wouldn't they want to make room? Of course, there's no way Yang would be able to join the ruling triumvirate (Three's a troika, but four's a mess). Still, I can envision one of those 30,000 foot big picture jobs where they get paid a lot for thinking deep thoughts. Give the guy the honorific title of "Chief Google" along with a swell tee shirt and turn him loose.

Strange but for some reason, no mention was made of Yahoo's other co-founder (and fellow Stanford alum) David Filo. Must have been an oversight.