By Cho Jin-seo
Staff Reporter
Kim Jin-soo is a rare breed for a leader of an Internet firm. He is not a young Bill Gates type who wears jeans with an MP3 player in his pocket. Nor is he a typical businessman with an overseas MBA degree or a career spanning consulting firms and conglomerates.
Rather, Kim thinks of himself more as an anthropologist, who studies the behavior of consumers and the relationship between humans and computers. Taking the job of representative director of Yahoo Korea this May, he believes that it is time for Korean Internet firms to turn their eyes to what the consumers really need from technology itself. Yahoo can set a good example of this, he hopes.
``Technology can do many things but not all of them can be successful. You have to understand people first. You must understand their need before introducing new services,'' he said in an interview commemorating the 10th anniversary of Yahoo Korea.
Kim joined the company in 2001 after earning a Ph.D. degree in cognitive science from Yonsei University. His major was human-computer interaction, an inter-disciplinary study on how to make computers work well for people.
When he first joined the company, Yahoo was the synonym for the Internet in South Korea. From the launch of he Korean site in 1997, the company dominated the Web search field until around 2000 with its advanced Web search techniques brought in from the United States.
Things have changed greatly since then. Locally grown sites such as Naver, Daum and Nate have showed new services tailored to the taste of Korean users, while Yahoo was stuck in introducing features that appealed little to the local audience. Struggling to find a breakthrough, the company appointed Kim as the director of the portal operation this spring and made Kim James Woo oversee both Yahoo and Overture Korea as general manager.
``We were the Internet leader in the early days, but now we are just a follower. But we will leap forward again to be a leader for the next decade,'' he said. ``That does not mean that we will lead in the number of visitors or page views. We want to lead the market with new concepts.''
To revamp the Yahoo Korea's Web site, he believes that it is too hard or too time-demanding to catch up with others in search, blog and other social-networking services. So he first reorganized the news section by reinforcing the editorial team. After all, it is the people who should evaluate the each piece of news articles, he says. The result has been encouraging so far as the daily page view has jumped by 38 percent since then.
As a father of a third-grade elementary schoolgirl, Kim also believes that firms and society should bear more responsibility on the use of the Internet and other computer technologies by the youth.
``There was a joke that Russian scientists developed the Tetris game to distract their American counterparts from work. Likewise, many people are wasting their life in PC Bangs (Internet cafes) and game arcades. It is very important to help people restrain and control themselves,'' he said.
``Technology can help it in some ways. But it is the parents' responsibility to let their children know that there are other values in the world outside the Internet.''