Jerry Yang announced he is stepping down as CEO of Yahoo! today. Yang's year-and-a-half long tenure as CEO was marked by him railing against a Microsoft takeover and failing to complete an advertising agreement with Google that probably would have been blocked by the Justice Department anyway.
Yang understood what his company isn't: it isn't an arm of Microsoft, the Gibralter of computing that makes up for its lack of innovation with its largess. Though he did express some willingness to negotiate, surely Yang's heart had something to do with his resistance. As the first search engine to acheive mainstream appeal and recognition back in the late 1990s, perhaps Yang felt it would be unfair for the once-cutting-edge Yahoo! to be swallowed by Microsoft's corporate establishment.
The problem is that Yang can't answer what his company is - and, more importantly in the online world, what it will be. Google fills so many niches in the online world, how does Yahoo! compete? Yang saw this and attempted an ill-fated search advertising deal that, in the end, went nowhere. Clearly, Yang loves Yahoo!, but the company - whose stock price has fallen from a 2008 high of jsut over $30 per share to a low of just over $10 per share - clearly needs a direction and vision.
Hopefully for Yahoo!, Yang's replacement will match his passion for the company with a vision for how it fits into the modern web world.
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