Yahoo! had a new CEO. Can Jerry Yang lead the company to a new level?

A very recent news, Jerry Yang has replaced Terry Semel to be Yahoo's CEO. Though Yahoo! had survived from the dot-com bust under the lead of Semel, its influence declines conspicuously in recent years accompanied by the rise of Google. Can the crowning of Yang slow down or even reverse the decline of Yahoo? It is hard to tell at this moment. But one thing is for sure---Yang will have a long to-do list to accomplish. In a recent survey, up to now (people still can vote at this moment) 44% of people believed that Yang might not be the right choice for Yahoo CEO; in contrast to that only 22% voted yes.

Indeed, I don't think that the fate of the battle between Yahoo and Google will be any difference only if Yahoo has gotten a new CEO, even if this one is Jerry Yang. Personally, I have great respect to Yang for his great vision of founding such a great company (Yahoo) in history. But the once glory of Yahoo has gone with the rise of Google. Yahoo had once established a new model of web search. But Google perfected this model to its ultimate. Once upon a time, Google was a little follower of Yahoo. Except of the PageRank algorithm, Google followed everything Yahoo had invented. But now, many evidences show that Yahoo is following Google. Google has invented so many great applications by facilitating searched web resources. It is even difficult for Yahoo to follow up; let it alone beating the ambitious Google. At present, the opponent of Google is no longer Yahoo, it is Microsoft.

In the second part of my web evolution article, I have presented a brief study of the rise of Google, as well as the decline of Yahoo. Along with several of my previous posts, I believed that the future of Yahoo is lay on a complete new vision of web search. I doubt anybody could beat against Google any more underlying this traditional web search model. Google has executed it too well. And this traditional web search model allows the winner taking all the shares eventually. Yahoo must figure out a new solution, an alternative solution. Otherwise, Novell's present would be Yahoo's future. Novell was once a company leading the world in the network realm, and it had the power to decide the fate of others. But now Novell becomes barely more than a normal middle-size company that is struggling its own survival among the big brothers (once he was one of them).

Can Yang again lead Yahoo to a new route as he had done several years before? Can my vision of web evolution be realized by Yahoo? Best wishes to Yang and Yahoo!