How Yahoo! Has Become the Best 'Has-Been' on the Market

The company's annual revenue has fallen from its high in 2008 where it reached $7.2 billion to just $5 billion for fiscal 2011, while Google has enjoyed a revenue increase during that same span, reaching $38 billion last year. As another sign of the company's past failures, these events continue to bring to the forefront what an egregious mistake it was to have turned down a buyout offer from Microsoft four years ago (this month) at a price of $33 per share or $47.5 billion. Today, the company has a market cap of just $18.6 billion while having never traded above $20 during that same span.

I don't see how the company will be able to recover from these collapses. It begs the question, what should now be at the top of its mission? And if it is reached, will it be enough to say with any degree of certainty that the company is once again a success? As an investor, I am starting to appreciate the reality that this run is over -- regardless of where the company goes from here. Yahoo! has followed the irrelevance path pioneered by AOL(AOL) and Research in Motion(RIMM) and as such it will likely never be anything (again) other than a has-been -- a dubious category where its recent announcement have now catapulted it to the top ranking. The company's hopes now rest on interim CEO, Ross Levinsohn, a Carol Bartz hire two years ago who has had some successful stints while at News Corp(NWS) .

The good news for Yahoo! is that Levinsohn's media experience may prove to be exactly what the company needs to further execute its turnaround. But how long are investors willing to sit through another failed strategy -- one that constantly leads to adapting to a new personality? Disappointing in all of this is how the company's board continues to be shielded from public scrutiny as attention is placed solely on the failures of the CEO. But the fact is, not only has the board been responsible for all of these botched hires, but it was also the board's decision to turn down almost $50 billion from Microsoft and now it appears to be struggling to close the deal on its 40% stake in China's Alibaba Group.

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