• D: All Things Digital, Thursday, November 13, 2008 11:31 AM

Things are just turning from bad to worse at Yahoo. First came the turning down of Microsoft's $31 and $33 per share offers, and then came the eventual collapse of its proposed search deal with Google. Now, Yahoo is trading at close to $10 per share. Of course, it would be easy to lay blame on CEO Jerry Yang, but BoomTown writer Kara Swisher thinks a larger boulder should be tossed in the direction of Yahoo's "incredibly shrinking board."

After all, the board is Yang's boss, which is "why their apparent stasis is just astonishing, if it were not quite so appalling." Swisher adds that she isn't alone in her thinking, as several major Yahoo investors have watched their equity shrink "with horror" as the board stands idly by. What, for example, happened to activist investor Carl Icahn, who muscled his way into the Yahoo board last summer with the intention of shaking things up. Icahn, who owns five percent of the company, has been unusually quiet and has lost a fortune in the months since making his investment.

"They have no sense of urgency or seem to feel any pressure to do anything, even though by every metric they have failed," said one angry investor. "Should they kick Jerry out? Should they restart talks with Microsoft? Should they consider other options to turn the company around? And while they telling me they are going to do something, nothing happens." Said another: "With all the other things going on in the economy, I have just decided to move on and write Yahoo off...but the lack of action by the board is really hard to understand."

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