If Yahoo Gets The Wrong CEO, Who Cares Anymore?

The consensus of opinion seems to be that Yahoo has appointed the wrong CEO in PayPal boss Scott Thompson, but the surprising thing is just how resigned we all seem to be about that.

Let’s not forget that Yahoo rejected a a $44.6 billion (£28.2bn) offer from Microsoft in 2008. It’s fortunes have fallen since then, but with shares at about $15, it still has a market capitalisation of around $20 billion. Yahoo does still matter.

“He sounds a nice guy”

The problem is that, as with so many other companies before it, the world changed, moving away from the field Yahoo originally dominated. Yahoo’s portal-based directory approach was trumped by Google’s search orientation and then, while Yahoo tried to catch up, social media carried out its threat to change things again.

So Yahoo had a better portal, with better instant messaging, finance news and all the rest of it, but that did not impress the users or the markets. Yahoo’s fate doesn’t look that different from that of Myspace and AOL before it.

In 2008, Yahoo rejected the logical way to make the best of this. It sent Microsoft packing and while Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer later called that a  “lucky escape”, Yahoo has been stumped for an alternative.

It signed a ten-year search and advertising deal for Microsoft’s Bing search engine, and took on a different CEO, but that did little to halt its decline. Carol Bartz was sacked by phone in September and five months on, the company has a new CEO who promises to “do something”.

Unfortunately, he is a technologist. Yahoo’s problems are not technological; they are to do with the fundamental question of what Yahoo is in a post-portal age.

Commenters have pounced on this. Various genuine analyst quotes are all summed up in this (presumably made-up) quote from a “Yahoo exec”, in a Business Insider story: “He sounds like a nice guy. It’s so not what we need. We need a f***ing animal to come in and change this company.”