• The New York Times, Wednesday, June 13, 2007 10:15 AM

What's wrong with Yahoo? That question has unfortunately been asked one too many times in the last 18 months. Yesterday, the company held an angry shareholder meeting during which CEO Terry Semel was chided for his massive pay package and inability to improve the company's under-performing stock price. Indeed, since the infamous Jerry Maguire-like "Peanut Butter Manifesto" last fall, Yahoo has gone from being spread too thin to, well, utter confusion as the company struggles to figure out where its core business units are headed.

The "Peanut Butter" memo was spread (sorry) internally, but the latest call to task has come directly from Yahoo shareholders. Using YouTube as his mouthpiece, shareholder Eric Jackson mounted a grassroots campaign calling for, among other things, the removal of Semel. "The company has tremendous assets," Jackson told The New York Times. "But there needs to be new blood and new direction." The Times says Jackson won't change much with his campaign, but his discontent underscores the greater theme of shareholder discontent, made evident at the meeting yesterday.

And he's right: Yahoo has great assets and very poor monetization. The Times says the most troubling sign of all is the defection of its long-time and higher-up employees; most of them had lived through better times. The most high-profile departure was 11-year veteran Farzad Nazem, the head of its audience group, in December. Yahoo has yet to name a replacement. In all, 17 executives at the vice president level or above have left since Yahoo planned its three-pronged restructuring program in December.

Read the whole story at The New York Times »