Yahoo chairman, board members step down

David Brancaccio Feb 8, 2012

They call it “Yahoo!”, but the online “portal” as they used to label it, is an unhappy place these days. The chairman and three other Yahoo board members have just stepped down. Co-founder Jerry Yang recently quit and before that, the CEO Carol Bartz was fired.

If you have a great news business strategy for Yahoo that will help them start making lots of money again, you might want to pop ’em an email. And I’m only half kidding.

Laura Didio, a tech industry analayst at the consulting firm ITIC, says it’s not that Yahoo is a bad search engine.

Laura Didio: The issue is that they are being subsumed, if you will, just by the sheer power and marketing muscle that the Googles of the world have. And that’s really tough.

She says job one for new leadership at Yahoo may be selling parts, if not all, of the company.  And doing something to cure a sense of dread over there.

Didio: They’re also going to have to jump start employee morale, which has got to be at an all-time low, given all of these upheavals that have been going on over the past several years as they lose market share.

Perhaps it’s the exclamation point at the end of the Yahoo name that’s holding it back.

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