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Nobody would confuse Yang with being an operational guru; it's not his forte. Upon news of Yang's return, Valley Wag, a Silicon Valley blog, quipped that Yang was "no Steve Jobs," a shorthand way of saying the founder won't be able to right the corporate ship, even if he does know more about Yahoo than virtually anyone else on the planet.
But as The Economist was eager to point out, Yang is well liked inside Yahoo, and even more important, he is an engineer's CEO. If Zlotin is right about Yahoo needing to focus more on the user experience (a charge countless other critics have leveled at the company), then Yang might be the only person on Earth to lead the crusade.
In a blog post, Business 2.0 Editor-at-Large Erick Schonfeld, who had criticized Yang's return, laid out the case for why he might be the best leader for Yahoo.
"His ascendancy means that the engineers are back in charge, which is the only way to fight Google," Schonfeld wrote. "Yahoo has all the pieces in place it needs to succeed (Project Panama, social media, widgets, mobile). They just need to all click into place. So Yahoo doesn't need a change in strategy so much as it needs better execution of its current, albeit, complicated one."
Jason Calacanis, the "Mahalo" CEO, gushed at the return of Yang, calling the board's decision to bring the founder back "brilliant."
"The fact is our business is about one thing: product," Calacanis blogged. "Google has better product than Yahoo, Yahoo has better product than Microsoft. The pecking order is based on product on the internet because switching costs are zero. Users go to the best product... it's that simple. Really."
While crystal balls can be dangerous, and change (even by internet standards) could be a long way off, it's worth noting that Yahoo's ability to return with a vengeance is very real, if it can turn out the best product.
Yahoo claims 500 million worldwide users, and its page, which is loaded with everything from news, sports, weather, stocks and entertainment, consistently ranks among the internet's top destinations.
Barbarians at the gates
Not long after Yang's return, News Corp. boss Rupert Murdoch dropped a cyber bombshell when he proposed a stock swap that would give him a 25 percent stake in Yahoo in return for MySpace.
While the rumor won't exactly die, it doesn't make a lot of sense to Savitz.
"The management change at Yahoo makes it a lot less likely that Yahoo will be sold; I can't imagine Jerry Yang deciding to sell the company he helped create," Savitz says. "There is nothing all that surprising about the flurry of big ad-related acquisitions; ultimately, the web is an advertising driven business, and Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are all trying to get a slice of the pie."
For Savitz, the potential deal that could make sense eventually would be for Microsoft to acquire Yahoo as a way to solve its internet woes. But as many pundits have pointed out, the potential gains of such a massive merger could easily be undone by the difficulty of assembling a new corporate entity.
While Zlotin agrees that a MySpace stock swap doesn't make a lot of sense for Yahoo, he's not willing to rule out another social networking play.
"Yahoo could buy a major social media company like Facebook, to combat News Corp./MySpace and Google/YouTube," Zlotin says. "The opportunity would be to cross-promote its wealth of content and products with one of the fastest growing, substantial and enthusiastic interactive user bases in the U.S."
If that's the case, Yahoo has a pressing need for geek-speak, according to The Economist, which predicted that Yang would likely be worth his weight in gold in meetings with other internet entrepreneurs. The magazine criticized Semel for being "too old and dithering" to hit it off with the likes of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg when he "bungled several important deals."
"Yang may be better at talking to start-ups that Yahoo wants to buy," The Economist wrote.
While the minutia of acquisition is often shielded from the public eye, it is the "talking to start-ups" that Google founder Eric Schmidt seems to have mastered. Hardly a week goes by without Google gobbling up another start-up.
Perhaps Yang will finally give Schmidt a run for his money in the race to collect the best of the web. If he does, more than a few Wall Street analysts will eat crow, but they'll probably tout Yahoo as the next Google, too.
Michael Estrin is associate editor at iMediaConnection. Read full bio.
