Also, I couldn’t disagree more about the credit you give Semel for bringing Yahoo back from the brink. When he came in, his big focus was on moving the revenue base to 50% subscription and 50% advertising. That was idiotic and of course never happened. His other big focus was to add a lot of gray hair types like him who knew nothing about technology. Yahoo turned around because paid search became a huge market, yet Yahoo did very little to improve its search or search monetization under Semel other than making reactive and desperate acquisitions like Overture and Inktomi after it became an emergency for Yahoo to own those technologies. Despite it being Yahoo’s biggest revenue source the entire time, it took Semel 5 years to decide to upgrade Overture’s paid listings system.

There’s a good argument that Semel is the worst CEO in the history of the world since under his watch Google, who was a partner very dependent on Yahoo’s traffic, turned into Yahoo’s biggest competitor and added about $200 billion in market cap while Yahoo added about $10 billion. Yahoo lost $190 billion in value to a partner dependent on them in 6 years. Oops.

Anwyay – point of the long rant isn’t that Semel is an idiot – it’s that the board hired the wrong CEO back then – wrong guy, wrong background, etc. and its makeup now gives no confidence it’s making better decisions this time.