Michael Arrington interviews YouSendit Chief Executive Officer Brad Garlinghouse(Credit:Dan Farber/CNET)NEW YORK — In 2006, Brad Garlinghouse became known for his ”Peanut Butter Manifesto,” a highly critical analysis of Yahoo’s management and business strategy.

He wrote:”We want to do everything and be everything, to everyone. We’ve known this for years, talk about it incessantly, but do nothing to fundamentally address it. We are scared to be left out. We are reactive instead of charting an unwavering course. We are separated into silos that far too frequently don’t talk to each other. And when we do talk, it isn’t to collaborate on a clearly focused strategy, but rather to argue and fight about ownership, strategies and tactics. Our inclination and proclivity to repeatedly hire leaders from outside the company results in disparate visions of what winning looks like, rather than a leadership team rallying around a single cohesive strategy.”.

At the time he was the senior vice president in charge of services including Yahoo’s home page and mail.

In an interview at TechCrunch Disrupt with Crunchfund’s Michael Arrington, Garlinghouse, now Chief Executive Officer of cloud storage company YouSendit, said that Yahoo, which he left because he doubted that it could be turned around, can be saved.

He pointed to the gloom and doom around Apple in 1996, and its subsequent resurrection as a parallel to what could happen at Yahoo.

 ”In 1996, the cover of Businessweek was about the death of American icon and at the center of that was Apple Computer.

Period,” he said.Of course, Yahoo would need to find its own Steve Jobs, who returned to Apple in 1995, a decade after he was booted out of the company he co founded. It won’t be Yahoo co founder and former Chief Executive Officer Jerry Yang.Garlinghouse recommended that Yahoo spend its billions in capital acquiring companies with dynamic leadership. He mentioned Mike McCue, a founder of Flipboard and Tellme Networks, and Amit Kapur, former MySpace COO and now Chief Executive Officer of Gravity.  ”As a leader, Mike McCue would be transformative to the culture of Yahoo,” he said. Over the last several years Jerry Yang, Carol Bartz and Scott Thompson have been living in the Peanut Butter world, trying to turn Yahoo around and come up with a cohesive strategy.  Garlinghouse gave Thompson, who recently was forced to resign over a false claim in his resume, some credit for making some progress. “The early indications were he was taking to heart a lot of things that had to happen,” he said. Arrington asked Garlinghouse whether he was in the running for Chief Executive Officer Yahoo. He demurred that “at various times” there had been “informal outreach about the company.

On May 13, 2012, Scott Thompson was replaced by Ross Levinsohn as the company’s interim Chief Executive Officer.

Christiane Ruston is a business journalist based in Barcelona, Spain. Christiane has a passion for financial markets and breaking news stories and loves writing about business news, stock market, and economic opinions that matters most to its audience. Christiane spends a lot of time discovering and researching latest financial markets and industry news stories in order to make sure the latest and greatest stories are brought to you first on BigBoardNews.com.