Solving Yahoo's identity crisis

…from 33 billion in December 2006. In contrast, Google's total US monthly page views rose by 76 percent to about 24 billion. Google's total monthly visitors also grew to 133 million in December, up 18 percent from the previous year.

Search was a similar story. Yahoo's share of the US search market dropped to 23 percent in December, down by about five percent year over year. Google's share of the search market was about 58 percent, up from about 52 percent last year.

Globally, Yahoo is second to Google, too. In December, Yahoo had 485 million monthly visitors worldwide, versus Google's 588 million, according to comScore.

In its rivalry with Google, Yahoo also has struggled with identity: it's fluctuated from being a search player to being a media property focused on selling brand and graphical ads.

During the Semel years, Yahoo crafted an image as a media company by establishing new headquarters in Santa Monica, California, hiring Lloyd Braun and attempting to develop original programming. The results were, by most accounts, disappointing. And, while Yahoo is still investing in original content — it just launched a new business TV show, much like one it used to operate before the dot-com bust — Yang and other executives are taking the company in a different direction.

One former executive put it like this: "Yahoo's been weighed down by trying to do too many things and not being very good at any of them, [and] not having the commitment to excel at any of them."

Yahoo's future may be in its past, and Yang said as much at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month. Straight out of the '90s internet textbook, Yang wants Yahoo to be the starting point for online users, with greater emphasis on mail, search and personal home pages. The company also plans to deliver technologies including the Go 3.0 mobile products and a new email platform. Last October, Yang also said the company would focus on extending its advertising offerings beyond Yahoo to sites across the web and open up Yahoo's technology infrastructure to third-party developers and publishers.

If you're going to keep an organisation young, you must continue to work on getting everyone on the same page, with knowledge flowing up and down and across

Raymond Miles, University of California at Berkeley

To trim down, Yahoo also indicated in recent months that the company would phase out or consolidate services like photos, premium music and auctions.

Miles said there's another problem inside companies like Yahoo. Ideas for new products, if they're not in the strategic plan of product launches, are often stifled because they're competing against those which actually are in the plan.

In fairness, companies like Yahoo can suffer from their own success. Often, a new product that competes with or doesn't directly benefit what made that company a success can be ignored, or worse, killed off. As a result, the employees who had those new ideas leave. Yahoo has had a flood of executives depart in recent years to head up companies like online video site GoFish. In another example, Yahoo's former director of product marketing, Richard Frankel, just joined SocialMedia Networks, an ad network for Facebook, as its chief operating officer.

"Silicon Valley is awash with people who have left their company because no-one would listen to them," said Berkeley's Miles. Because ideas flow upward from the company, Miles said, changing top management isn't always enough to recharge a business.

"If you're going to keep an organisation young," Miles said, "you must continue to work on getting everyone on the same page, with knowledge flowing up and down and across."