In addition to firing CEO Carol Bartz, Yahoo's board has now put the company up for sale.
The person who briefed the Wall Street Journal on the Bartz firing also told the paper that "Yahoo is open to selling itself to the right bidder."
That's the equivalent of sticking a FOR SALE sign on the lawn.
The board canned Bartz, the WSJ's sources say, after studying the company's assets for two weeks and concluding that Bartz was doing a lousy job. If this is really true, one wonders what on earth the board has been doing for the past two years, while pretty much everyone else concluded the same thing.
There's no quick fix for Yahoo. The company needs to embrace the fact that it's now a media, content, and communications company--and make heavy investments in those areas. It needs to radically streamline itself. And it needs a leader with a clear product vision and the ability to execute on it.
The trouble with the above prescription is that, if the board is equally happy to just sell Yahoo, this leader will be even harder to find. And, in the meantime, the company will be even more firmly entrenched in the purgatory that has frozen it for the last couple of years.