What Jack is not going to do

I've become a great fan a limited number of podcasts. I particularly like Stanford's Draper Fisher Jurvetson-sponsored Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar series (available from iTunes). They're about an hour long and help to pass long flights in an interesting way. Yesterday, I was listening to KLA-Tencor's Rick Wallace who commented "The essence of strategy is what you are not going to do".

So, this report of Yahoolibaba Jack Ma's speech in Shanghai last week caught my eye. It seems as though Jack did his usual job of charming the crowd. I was particularly interested to note the following:

- He will never enter the online gaming business because he thinks it's bad for kids;

- His vision for Alibaba is to help create a million jobs for Chinese people;

- He decided to buy Yahoo because he thinks that search will become critical to the future development of online commerce websites such as Alibaba, Taobao and eBay;

- During the Q&A, an audience member asked him what he felt about online dating sites; he said that Alibaba could possibly enter that business because it fulfilled a real need and could make people happy.

For Chinese readers, it also points to Jack's own blog.

Update: the same conference, with flattering references to Jack, is also blogged by Shaun Rein here.