• Wired, Tuesday, June 19, 2007 11 AM

Web pundits today are left wondering what if any affect the reinstatement of Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang will have on the beleaguered Web giant. Just about everyone agrees that Terry Semel had to go-"The short answer is he screwed up," Wired said of the company's former chief. "During his six years as CEO, he let his principal competitor, Google, grow from a pipsqueak into a giant."

It's a little unfair to compare Google to Yahoo. Google makes money like an old-fashioned media company: It's core mission is to provide an outlet for content--in this case, the Web's content. So it focuses most of its resources on making that content easier to find. It isn't necessarily Semel's fault that Yahoo was originally a creator and aggregator of content that came late, very late, to the search party.

But it isn't just search: what do Google Earth, Gmail, Google Reader, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, etc. have in common? They're Web and communication services, tools that became content. When you consider that they're also products that sell themselves (Yahoo spends hundreds of millions on marketing to Google's zero), you begin to understand why Semel is out of a job today.

Yang now is faced with the tall task of saving the company he founded.

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