Now that it has sunk in, can we stop pretending that changing the person sitting in the CEO chair is a silver bullet to save a struggling company? This company has gone through painful revolving door of CEOs that has done no favors for shareholders and put the somehow still loyal staff through the wringer. And for what? To come back to the same plan that Jerry Yang had all along?

Wow, that 2011 Yahoo Plan looks exactly like what she's proposing they do.

It's just that for some reason Yahoo Board trusts Marissa Mayer to do it, and they didn't trust Ross Levinsohn. Or Scott Thompson. Or Carol Bartz. Or Jerry Yang, unfortunately.

Perhaps the best thing for a company is just, consistency.

The article kinda hints that leadership does not matter. I could not disagree more with that idea.

They should sell to Apple or Microsoft maps, Flickr, mail, and search. Focus on content, commerce, and display advertising. Use cash to buy media properties that enhance this (e.g. Pinterest, Spotify, Netflix, SB Nation, techcrunch, MySpace).

I like the idea of focusing on commerce.

Acquire Square and Etsy and grow, grow, grow!

Yes. Social commerce is not even in the first inning. They could try that.

Yahoo could and should try social commerce because it's a differentiator that puts them in the sweet spot between Amazon and Google, the two companies that have learned to best monetize the Internet.

Tech turnarounds are hard at best. They rarely succeed. IBM and Apple (but they brought back the founder - a very different situation) are the only ones that worked.

That's a great point, Lara.

The most chilling point that Sarah Lacy makes here is that Marissa's plan resembles the plan founder Jerry Yang wanted to do.

I would make a point that there has been a tech turn around at MSFT, too. Bill Gates left MSFT with the idea of secure computing as a goal for the company, and they brought him back ten years later because he goals was achieved. Security is still and always will be a problem, but that focus allowed MSFT at least stop the pain on Windows. Office is another matter.

Why did Microsoft not make Office secure too?

Office is only an application, not the OS. OS is more important in my opinion. I was referring more toward improving a key revenue product. MSFT improved Windows a lot over the last ten years, so they remain #1 for enterprise for awhile longer thanks to those improvements. They have not made Office similarly that much better.

Perhaps because adding to Office would only make it worse?