Aplus.net Blog

Inspired no doubt by this week’s news that Yahoo’s CEO is stepping down — and the uncharacteristic jump in stock value that greeted the news — Channel Web today published a very informative summary of the recent tribulations of Yahoo.

As we’ve covered extensively here at the Aplus.net Blog, 2008 has been a wild year for the company that’s still the world’s second-largest search engine destination (third, if you’re counting YouTube). Beginning with Microsoft’s unsolicited offer to buy the company in the early weeks of 2008, continuing through a tortuous round of negotiations this summer in which the company attempted to merge its search ad service with Google’s, and ending with a stunning series of setbacks that included the collapse of the Google deal, a subsequent rebuke by Microsoft, and the ousting of the company’s CEO, it’s generally agreed that Yahoo is in pretty big trouble. (As evidenced most concretely in the fact that the value of its stock has fallen to less than a third of its worth at the beginning of the year.)

But how did it get here? How does a company that still sits near the top of the search engine market find itself in such dire straits? Was it bad management by Yang (who at one point rejected a deal from Microsoft for $33 a share — $23 per share more than the company’s stocks are currently valued)? Or was such a near-collapse inevitable given Google’s aggressive dominance of the market?

And, most importantly, what does this mean for the online business community? Do we really want to see the demise of  Yahoo and the reduction of the search engine market to even fewer major choices than we currently have?

Check out the article at Channel Web (authored by Brian Kraemer) to get the big picture, and come back to share your thoughts in the comments section.