Yang out; what now for Yahoo!?

Jerry Yang will be stepping down as Yahoo! CEO in the near future; as soon as they find a capable replacement. In an email to the employees, he says the decision to step down was taken jointly with the board. In translation: the board gave a vote of no confidence especially after he let Microsoft walk away from a $47.5 billion offer made in May. After the announcement, Yahoo! shares went up 4%. More pressure was added when last week Tuesday Google abandoned a search advertising partnership. There was also growing concern from investors and analysts as Yahoo!’s shares plunged to an all time low. A merger/partnership with Time Warner AOL also failed, which was going to boost Yahoo!’s earnings.

So, What does this mean for Yahoo!?
They could suck up to Microsoft and try get them to go back to that offer of $47,5 billion dollars, which means the company will be in new hands and new ideas will be generated leading to it waking up from its current slumber. The new CEO could push for the
re-branding of Yahoo! as the first stop for online consumers instead of Facebook and Google. If you are searching for something your first port of call is Google whilst for your first port of call for social activities you go to Facebook.

One of Yahoo!’s problems, according to Yang, was not tapping into the huge developer community built applications, Yahoo! tried that on its own. They have now opened that side of the market — opening Yahoo!’s network to be a platform. The new CEO could be more open to a lot of new ideas and to get more different applications that could attract back Yahoo!’s consumer market. The way the internet has been moving, at a very high speed, meant that Yahoo! has been trying to cover different aspects of the internet making it run in a thousand and unrelated directions. Pulling all the aspects together and into one direction will need a very strong and good directional boss.

But then my question to you, the reader, is: how could Yahoo!, one of the early boomers of the internet, end up like it is right now? What is there for Yahoo! going forward?