How sad that no one convincing has stepped up to run Yahoo! Pursued then spurned by Microsoft, the company is looking to replace founder Jerry Yang. Mike Murdock, a disabled Navy veteran, has raised his hand. The name sounded familiar.

That's because Murdock is the same guy who campaigned for the job of Apple CEO back in 1997, when Steve Jobs was only working as the company's interim chief. He emailed Jobs and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, a close friend of Jobs and an Apple board member at the time, to make his pitch. In a prank, Jobs and Ellison told Murdock he had the job. He later had to be told not to show up at Apple's campus.

I don't know if Yahoo should reject him so readily. Here's Murdock's bio:

Hi and welcome to the site. I wanted to take a moment and give you a bit of background on me and why I am here. I am a US NAVY DISABLED VETERAN. I got my start in computers in 1975/1976 and very early on saw the potential for these machines in our lives. It's amazing how far they've come from the days when we carried paper tape and then cassettes for data storage. Now that and more fits on a simple USB stick.

The power of the web like the computer systems amazed me when it was first unleashed to the public. I can remember sitting in my office at Pixar Animation Studios (when we were still named PIXAR) and thinking...this thing called a browser has some potential, one day people will use this like they use a newspaper. In fact, this will probably replace newspapers.

See? Total visionary. Under Yang, Yahoo has been busy making deals with newspapers rather than predicting their doom. Murdock might be a better CEO than Yang, at the least — and that, sadly, is no joke.

A video from Murdock on Yang's departure: