Yahoo CEO Steps Down - Good Move or Déjà vu?
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Yahoo's stock fell nearly 30 percent over the past 18 months. It is clearly losing ground to Google, who seems to hold a larger share of the search market every time comScore Media Matrix issues a new report. With Semel out of the CEO position, will the people taking over be able to navigate the company out of its current quagmire?
Well, let's not forget that Jerry Yang was partly to blame for getting Yahoo into the quagmire that made Terry Semel as CEO look like a good idea. That's not entirely Yang's fault though. He became a billionaire at 29...and then the market turned. Still, he did sign off on some decisions that look questionable in retrospect, like purchasing Broadcast.com for $5 billion and GeoCities for $2.8 billion. On the other hand, Yang is said to be very much in touch with the needs of Yahoo's customers; to use industry slang, he not only created the dog food, he eats it, in preference to anything else. Terry Semel didn't, and for that reason he never had the intuitive grasp of what Yahoo is and needs to become that Yang brings to the table.
Meanwhile, Susan Decker has been receiving nothing but compliments for how she's been managing her positions. She has served as Chief Financial Officer for Yahoo since the dot-com bubble burst, and has been a consistently rising star. Rumors have been circulating for a long time that she is being groomed for the CEO position; they only intensified after Yahoo reorganized itself into three main divisions, and she became the head of one of them. Some see her promotion to president as a snub; personally, I see it as another chance for her to gain some more experience before they give her the CEO position. No one can blame Jerry Yang for wanting to step in personally to try to save the company he founded after all.
Will this team be up to the challenges they face? Yang identified his priorities as dealing with an under-performing search monetization platform, the company's rivals for user traffic, and the stream of employees leaving the company. He's going to have quite a job ahead of him just boosting employee morale; many employees first learned about the change in leadership through the media. Apparently no internal email was sent before the announcement.
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