Yahoo!: Bring Back Terry Semel

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Since Terry Semel left the CEO seat at Yahoo! (YHOO) the stock is down over 10% and recently that number was closer to 20%.

Yahoo! announced today that it has paid $350 million to buy Zembra, an open source e-mail and calendar company. Now it can compete with Google (GOOG) Apps and Microsoft (MSFT) Office. Like going after an elephant with a water pistol.

Yahoo! has also announced that it will start a social network called Mash. There are only about 1,000 companies in that business, lead by MySpace and Facebook.

Yahoo! also just bought a news-aggregation Web site called BuzzTracker. And, the company is selling display ads for UK-based social network Bebo. Display advertising is not growing very fast anymore, especially compared to the kind of search-based ads they do so well over at Google (GOOG).

If there does not seem to be a pattern here, it is because there is not one. Yahoo! is throwing sh-t at the wall and hopes that some of it will stick. Any other explanation is beyond what the human mind can comprehend.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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