For the first time in a long time, there are more stories in the media about Yahoo than Google. With Terry Semel stepping down from the CEO position, everyone is wondering where the venerable search engine is headed. In this article, we’ll take a look at some possible scenarios.
A number of observers seem to be pretty convinced that the likeliest thing to happen will be a takeover. Kevin Kelleher writing for GigaOM even performs the service of handicapping the odds and grading the strategic sense of a marriage to five different entities. Others are also thinking along these lines; they point to Jerry Yang’s return as CEO as a sure sign that Yahoo will be sold to another company, since he’s one of the founders – if the board wasn’t looking to sell the company, why didn’t they search outside for a truly experienced CEO?
Yeah, right; tell that to Steve Jobs, unless you believe those rumors about Google pondering an Apple purchase. I’ll grant you, though, that Yang is no Jobs, and the circumstances under which the two left the top position and then returned to it at their respective companies were very different. In any case, we’ll take a closer look at those Yahoo wedding rumors in the next section of this article.
Other rumors about Yahoo’s future have been even wilder. Can you imagine Yahoo getting out of the search business after 13 years, and letting Google serve its results? It’s a bizarre idea, though not quite as crazy as it sounds, as you’ll see.
Does Yahoo perhaps intend to continue with business as usual? A strategy was set in motion before Terry Semel left, a multi-year plan that had just begun a few months earlier. The whole idea behind the plan was to streamline Yahoo and set it on a better path for its future. That may be the most likely course, but it’s questionable as to whether it will be enough to pull the search engine out of its seemingly hopeless rut and slide in the search market.
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