• TheStreet.com, Wednesday, December 24, 2008 11:45 AM

As the Yahoo board continues to take its sweet time naming a successor to former Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, TheStreet.com invites Ironfire Capital Manager Eric Jackson to give his reasons behind the Web giant's four-year slump. First and foremost is lack of product leadership -- i.e., the company has had its fingers in too many pies. All those acquisitions Yahoo's made over the years were never sufficiently integrated, leaving "a string of disparate businesses" under its umbrella.

A decided lack of communication between high-level execs and lower-level managers is another reason. As one former Yahoo admits to Jackson, "I had one good conversation with [one Yahoo! executive] and one good one with [another executive] in [the last few years]. That's it."

The former Yahoo adds that there were too many consultants, too many planning sessions, and too little actual execution. Meanwhile, once employees saw that no actual changes were coming, most became complacent and stopped pining for improvements, Jackson said.

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