The difference between Hollywood's glitzy sensibilities and the smarty-pants culture of Silicon Valley was distilled in a 20-word e-mail to workers in Yahoo Inc.'s Santa Monica office.
Sent this year on behalf of a Yahoo executive recently recruited from Fox Broadcasting Co., the e-mail noted that "SOMEONE" had parked in his space. For some who received it, the all-capitals dispatch read like a scream: "PLEASE MOVE OR YOU WILL BE TOWED."
After all, Yahoo prides itself on being the kind of place where the billionaire founders shun private offices. At Yahoo's Sunnyvale, Calif., headquarters, top executives eat in the cafeteria with rank-and-file employees.
And no one has an assigned parking space.
But as Yahoo strives to enter the league of Walt Disney Co., Viacom Inc. and other media giants, success hinges on its ability to merge two inherently different cultures: the brash, flashy ethos of entertainment executives and the rumpled, brainiac realm of computer nerds.
In the year since the company consolidated its Santa Monica office and began hiring a slew of former Hollywood executives bent on "convergence," Yahoo's leaders have sought to downplay the tensions. But the union has sometimes been rocky.
In Sunnyvale, it's "a cubicle society," said a person close to Yahoo, referring to the willingness of people at all levels to work in cramped workstations. Speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from Yahoo, this person said the Santa Monica office, by contrast, was about " 'How big is my office? Where is my parking spot? You report to me. I don't need to talk to you.' It's very much the studio hierarchy mentality."
Yahoo's ability to blend the cultures, milking each for what it does best, will be key to reaching its ultimate goal: to build on its success as the most visited destination on the Web by leveraging the links between content and the technology used to create and deliver it.
"The interactive industry and the traditional media companies are on a collision course, and Yahoo is the first and best example we can look at to see how it's going to shake out," said Jeff Lanctot, vice president of ad agency Avenue A/Razorfish. "They're a microcosm of what we're going to see in the media business in the next three to four years."
Hollywood and Silicon Valley are equally hierarchical, but they differ in how status is measured -- and flaunted.
