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

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- It's hard to quantify the level of embarrassment, if not the grossly pathetic punch line that has become search giant Yahoo! (YHOO). As a recent shareholder, learning that Scott Thompson has been ousted as CEO arrived as another black eye on the company. It seems to me that Yahoo! saw this as a way to address its own lack of credibility -- by getting rid of Thompson who has been battling credibility issues of his own due to an alleged bio that included a college degree that he never received.

Although the company has forced Thompson to fall on the sword hoping that all of this goes away, it only serves as a reminder to investors of the company's own past failures with due diligence. In plain point and fact, the company and its board have now become an absolute disaster. The question now is, what's next?

What this tells Wall Street is that the faith (misguided or otherwise) placed in the company's ability to execute a turnaround has been wasted -- generating even more restlessness from employees and shareholders who saw Thompson's arrival (four months ago) as a way to restore the technology beacon that once graced visitors with its search intelligence.

Ironically, the company has now been entrenched in a search of its own for a CEO -- one that can last longer than counting by months. Remarkably, the person that assumes the post next will bring the company's average to one CEO per year over the past five years -- each failing to live up to promises of "this time will be different."

What makes all of this even more disappointing is the fact that these challenges and distractions have unfolded while rivals in Google (GOOG) and Bing by Microsoft (MSFT) have dominated the search realm and enjoying increased online advertiser spending -- an area where Facebook's (FB) arrival as a public issue will only serve to further suppress Yahoo!'s ability to recover and magnify its failures to duplicate (if not) pioneer what Facebook has been able to accomplish.

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