Yang is drawing the consequences from his failed gamble in the takeover poker between Microsoft and Yahoo and is stepping down as Yahoo’s CEO. If we take a look Yahoo’s stock market price, take into consideration that right now Yahoo is laying off 10% of their employees and keep in mind that sites like Yahoo make a not-so-insignificant portion of their revenues through CPM-reservations, then we can see that the near future is not really looking bright for Yahoo.
When I read the announcement I started thinking about what Yahoo really is. And I was unable to answer this question to my satisfaction. Yahoo’s homepage is not exactly a beacon of clarity and when I look at the services they offer, which are also successful, then I find those to be services for which users have either been using Yahoo for ages and are too lazy to change (e.g. Mail) or which were aquired like Flickr/del.icio.us. The search, with which they are trying to draw away Google-marketshares since 2004 (!), is starting to become trivial even in the USA (Google jumped from 64% in 2007 to 74% in 2008 while Yahoo fell from 21% in 2007 to 17% in 2008 [Hitwise]) and that Yahoo has the capabilities to snag users away from other searchengines in the near future is something that I find to be rather doubtful. Let us see how this progresses.
