Following the dissolution of Yahoo's search partnership with Google, BoomTown writer Kara Swisher, who is not one to mince her words, proclaims that Yahoo is now "in the midst of a very serious
resetting of its business that might or might not go well, after years of mismanagement and damaging external forces over which it sometimes had control and sometimes not." She very seriously
questions whether the company's current leadership is up to the task of reviving the flagging Web giant, but concedes that this is irrelevant since CEO Jerry Yang will not be stepping down. Investor
activist Carl Icahn had his chance to throw Yang out of office and failed; so too, did Yahoo shareholders at the company shareholder meeting in August.
Even so, Swisher points out that
Yahoo's core product offerings remain some of the strongest on the Web, suggesting that the Web giant's depressed situation isn't as desperate as others are making it out to be. Yahoo is still the
Web's No. 1 destination for graphical ads and the No. 2 destination for search. As such, the collapse of the Yahoo-Google pact does not mean that Yang and co. will be forced to pursue a similar deal
with Microsoft. It does, however, make a Yahoo-AOL merger more than likely -- because Time Warner needs to get rid of AOL, and Yahoo simply has to do something.
Swisher adds that
Microsoft, meanwhile, will not show up with another Yahoo bid unless its stock tanks and/or Yahoo becomes such an amazing bargain that CEO Steve Ballmer is forced to buy it.
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