The resurgence of Yahoo!?

The CEO of Yahoo!, Terry Semel, was recently replaced by co-founder Jerry Yang. Many people jumped with excitement at the thought that maybe, after all this time of torture, Yahoo! might be able to turn things around. Even after being sent into a never-ending tail dive by their biggest competitor Google, they're still around at least, right? I for one am hoping for a revival of Yahoo!. I think some good old competition might help kick things up another notch on the internet, and that is when we will start to see some unimaginable technologies evolve for our use.

One major downside is that Jerry Yang hasn't had much experience in dealing with corporate workings. Even though he was CEO of Yahoo! in their 'startup' days, he was never CEO when Yahoo! went public. Even more, according to the London Times, Yang was a big supporter of Terry Semel, and a consultant in some important decisions (I'm assuming one of them to be the rumored failure to buy out Google years back), that left Yahoo! tailing behind Google. So, with that said, there has been some action to merge their search and display advertising departments, and an overall attempt to oil the gears and restructure the company.

I think they need to start taking lessons from the masters, and assign a "cultural manager", someone who keeps things going at Yahoo!, giving the feeling of a startup company, and motivating the employees. One would think that after many years of working for a company, your motivation would start to plummet, especially in the case of a failing company.

With the recent redesign of its advertising platform, Yahoo! is thought to have a boost in sales and start climbing back up as early as this year. So, please Yahoo!, take it slow, steady, reassuringly, and if something as good as Google falls into your lap next time, jump for it!