Yahoo after Yang

After 18 months and “a string of recent bad strategic moves,” Yahoo co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang is stepping aside, said Therese Poletti in MarketWatch. Yang was “briefly a hero to some within Yahoo” for fending of a $33-a-share takeover offer from Microsoft, but with Yahoo now trading under $11 a share, investors are glad to see him go. But Yahoo will need a new tech visionary to be competitive again.

If there were anyone out there who could turn Yahoo around, said Douglas McIntyre in 24/7 Wall St., he or she would already have been snapped up by Microsoft, which can’t find someone to run its own “troubled Internet unit.” In the past six years, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL have “eaten through close to a dozen CEOs,” and they’re all still struggling.

The search for a new CEO “seems to be more spin than reality,” anyway, said Fred Vogelstein in Wired online. It’s more than likely that Microsoft will offer "to buy the company for $20 a share by Thanksgiving”—and without Microsoft hater Yang to object, it’s hard to see how Yahoo will say no this time.

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Selling at least its search business to Microsoft “just makes sense,” said Larry Dignan in Seeking Alpha. Some sort of a merger or partnership is very likely, and Yahoo should embrace it. “A deal with Microsoft will allow Yahoo to focus on being what it really is—a media company.” Millions of users rely on Yahoo for content, and most “don’t care what search engine it uses.”