Yahoo

Yahoo's core business has been essentially flat ever since Google rose up to dominate its niche. Given the performance of most of Yahoo's competitors from the 1990s, Yahoo is an unabashed success story, but compared with Google, Yahoo is just another also ran.

Yahoo's board of directors seems to have finally figured out that something big needs to happen and it has undertaken a reorganization at the very top of the business. But the company's scatter-shot approach to the release of this information to the media and the absence of anything more than idle speculation lends credence to a reserved take on the situation.

Yahoo's new advertising platform has generated a great deal of attention on Wall Street, but Internet marketers know that Google has a stranglehold on this market. Without the ability to leverage search dominance in the same way that Google does, many analysts have suggested that Yahoo just outsource search to Google and concentrate its resources on a more profitable niche. Even a combination with MySpace is unlikely to give Yahoo the ability to beat back the behemoth.