Jerry Yang, who co-founded the search directory Yahoo! while a student at Stanford in 1994, has left his post as “Chief Yahoo!” and Board Member. Though a dedicated and involved leader, he has been facing criticism due to his decisions, including rejecting a $33/share sale offer from Microsoft in 2008 with the share price at $15.96 today. He has also been cited as the reason for not exiting Yahoo!’s stakes in Alibaba China and Yahoo! Japan, which would yield the firm around $12 billion. He was expected by the Board to do constant innovation and resurrect the firm like Jobs did with Apple – when it did not happen, a new CEO, Scott Thompson, was hired from eBay. With Yang at the helm or not, 75% of Yahoo!’s ad revenues are handled by Microsoft and it will be a challenge to create an innovative revenue model for the firm.
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