So Yahoo appears to have caved in the pressure from shareholders; chief executive Terry Semel took everyone by surprise and stood down from his position tonight. He'll be replaced by co-founder Jerry Yang, and former chief financial officer Susan Decker will become president.
Yahoo has been under pressure for some time, with shareholders concerned that the company is not agile and responsive enough to changes in the market and is being consistently outperformed by Google in both web advertising, search and in social media acquisitions. Yahoo's shares have risen 6% since the announcement.
Yahoo's press machine was working overtime. An open letter to Semel from the board was published on Yahoo's corporate site, emphasising the highlights of his reign, but and saying the new team would capitalise on the company's strengths in its "next phase of growth".
In the formal PR, Yang hinted at more changes: "My immediate and overarching priorities are to realise Yahoo!'s strategic vision by accelerating execution, further strengthening our leadership team and fostering an even stronger culture of winning."
Reaction in blogland will take a few more hours. Initially, one shareholder Joe Duck said he is thrilled to see Yang back in charge:
"I'm not sure Terry Semel even understood the significance of search and advertising driven computing, and probably did not grasp the significance of social computing which even Google is failing to fully grasp (but is profiting from because of their brilliant contextual matching programs so social networks can display relevant ads). Yahoo's panama can do this as well if Yang gets *competitive* and does the smart stuff like offer publishers higher revenue shares than Google."
