This one was a long-time coming. Many had already been speculating that Terry Semel would be replaced as the CEO of Yahoo! Well yesterday it happened. Who replaced him? Jerry Yang, one of the Yahoo! co-founders. I have to be honest, I’m not quite sure that this is the right direction. Yahoo! needs a total shakeup and this is not it. Typically start-ups have their executives replaced as soon as they get big. Conversely, a similar thing happened recently at Dell when Mr. Dell himself decided to take the helm again. Jerry Yang gives Semel much praise in his blog post.

Yahoo! has been in a rut recently with the unsuccessful launch of Panama. While all of the revenue generated by the new advertising system has yet to be realized, Yahoo has lost a large portion of their top executives to the competition. Also, Facebook has just taken a jab at Yahoo!, who has continued to be the dominant web portal. Had Mark Zuckerberg decided to spill the beans to Yahoo! about their new platform, I wonder if they would have received an offer greater than the $1 billion they were previously offered. Regardless, the web portal business is still an intensely competitive market and while Yahoo! has been shaken up in the past couple years, they are still at the forefront. It will be interesting to see where this leads!