Garlinghouse resurfaces, without stripes

Let's pause for a moment to enjoy a moment of peanut butter without salmonella: peHUB today reports that Brad Garlinghouse, the former Yahoo senior VP who in 2006 compared that company's increasingly overextended efforts to a thinly-spread sandwich topping, is up to something.

In a better world (or at least a world better to Yahoo's put-upon shareholders), Garlinghouse's memo, which castigated company leadership for lacking a "cohesive, focused vision" for the dot-com pioneer and bewailed redundant projects, a bloated bureaucracy, and the "phoning it in" mentality then becoming ubiquitous, would have been the butt-kicking that got Yahoo straightened up and flying right. As it was, some activity ensued -- then-COO Dan Rosensweig put Garlinghouse in charge of thinking through how his suggestions might be put into practice -- but political struggles followed and the rest is history. Garlinghouse left the company in mid-2008.

There are those who thought that Garlinghouse -- who comprehensively laid out Yahoo's problems years before Jerry Yang managed to do the same (perhaps even early enough that they could have been fixed?) -- was someone who might be interested in rejoining the company under the fresh leadership of Carol Bartz. But no, Garlinghouse is following his VC star with WithoutStripes, a software startup.

There's not much more than an SEC filing in place for WithoutStripes so far, and no one's ready to talk to the press. (Would you, in this market?) But for all the questions Garlinghouse's new gig raises, there's one it answers conclusively: the author of the memo that first laid out just how hairy things had gotten at Yahoo is not going to "bleed purple and yellow" again anytime soon.