Yahoo: All Shook Up

Just in time for fall, Yahoo's new management team is trying to jump-start the troubled tech giant by naming a respected former Knight Ridder digital media executive to take over its global sales brief.

By promoting her protégé, Hilary Schneider, Yahoo President Sue Decker is launching a major shakeup designed to consolidate her power and show investors that founder, C.E.O. and totem Jerry Yang's "100-day" reorganization project—initiated on July 17—is serious.

Among the changes: Greg Coleman, Yahoo's global ad sales boss is out, replaced by a "fast rising former Knight Ridder exec"—Schneider.

The scoop was allegedly spoon fed to the New York Times's Miguel Helft, with dribs and drabs leaking out yesterday via Kara Swisher and Valleywag.

Yahoo executives hope to turn the corner from a underwhelming chapter in corporate history in which the Internet pioneer suffered a multiyear drubbing from rival Google, which dominates the web search ad economy and dwarfs Yahoo in size, revenue and earnings.

Wall Street has punished Yahoo for its under performance. The stock has lost almost half its value since January 2006—that's not my idea of a stock split—against the backdrop of a tech run-up that has seen industry leaders soar.

Earlier this year, Terry Semel, the Brooklyn-born Hollywood power broker who was supposed to marry "original content" to Yahoo's web platform, was unceremoniously pushed out, in part because he failed to close a deal to buy Facebook, the latest Web 2.0 flavor of the month.

Semel supposedly offered Facebook conch-holder Mark Zuckerberg between $900 and $1.8 billion (depending on whom you believe), but the sandal-clad Harvard dropout rejected the pitch. Now Facebook valuations have bloomed to $10 billion as the company mulls an IPO.

Yang, Decker and Schneider are facing a Mohamed-and-the-mountain moment. And as a certain Victorian-era signal-master once said, "there is no second."

by Sam Gustin

^{Jerry Yang}