The Case for Yahoo's Survival

The headlines grow more ominous each day: “Crisis looms if swift action not taken.” Markets losing faith in leaders.” “Sharks circle the waters.” “No clear consensus on solution despite dire warnings.”

The European crisis? Nope.

The Super Committee? Nada.

Anyplace in the Mideast? Sure, but wrong again.

Yahoo? Bingo!

There was a time when Yahoo was the Internet; now it’s synonymous with corporate drift, management blunders and worker turnover and disenchantment.

Greg Cohn, a one-time rising star at the portal who left to launch a start up put Yahoo’s brain drain in perspective in an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Monday: "If you're not growing, if you're not giving people challenging things to work on, if you're not holding out the promise of creating some personal wealth during one of the frothiest technology markets in modern history, and if your people don't ultimately believe in your ability to deliver across that whole spectrum, you're toast,"

Don’t breakout the marmalade just yet. Yahoo’s not toast, but it will be if the board doesn’t emerge from negotiations with potential investors and rumored business partners with a deal that injects new vitality and a sense of purpose into the company. If it comes away with a clever financially engineered plan that rewards outside investors at the expense of employees, then it will be toast.

And that would be a shame, because the Internet needs Yahoo, if for no other reason than to keep Google and Facebook in check. Neither Google nor Facebook match Yahoo’s seamless integration of currated, aggregated and created content with powerful, easy-to-use tools. Yahoo’s content strategy has been a huge success for the company—it has more than 700 million monthly unique users—but it’s also been the lifeblood for Yahoo’s partners who get millions of qualified referrals every month from the site.

The old Yahoo understood the needs of its audience, media partners and advertisers more than its competitors, but somewhere along the line it lost focus. We should all hope it finds it again and soon.

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Mark Pawlosky is a writer for Portfolio.