ON CREDIT FOR YAHOO! "PEANUT BUTTER" LINE

WHERE CREDIT IS DUE

(Update:  The New York Times also has a related article on the challenges at Yahoo!)

Not surprisingly, the WSJ Yahoo! "Peanut Butter Memo/Manifesto" story (the topic of yesterday's post), is the rage today on Techmeme and elsewhere. 

Reading through the various posts, it's clear that many are giving Brad Garlinghouse, the senior Yahoo! executive who authored the memo, the credit for the "Peanut Butter" analogy.

But a point of clarification may be in order.  As Brad himself notes in the memo,

""I've heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular."

In other words, the "Peanut Butter" depiction of Yahoo!'s strategy has been part of the company's internal strategy vocabulary for some time. 

Brad is simply taking the politically astute opportunity to expound on it.  (For more on the politics of it all, see Michael Arrington's post at TechCrunch, and the ensuing comments).

So the question now becomes, who came up with the original "Peanut Butter" analogy within Yahoo!, and when will he/she step up for their own 15 minutes of fame?