Yang, who yesterday announced that he will step down as Yahoo’s CEO once a replacement is found, had taken multiple unsuccessful steps in recent months to turn around the flagging Internet pioneer. In May, he fended off Microsoft Corp.’s move to buy Yahoo and then failed to consummate a planned search partnership with Google.

Then, after Google backed away from its proposed deal with Yahoo earlier this month, Yang called on Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to restart negotiations to buy the company.

Yang is not perceived as having that kind of “boldness or decisiveness” that a company competing in today’s Web landscape needs, said Andrew Frank, an analyst at Gartner Inc. “[Yang’s departure is] a sign that Yahoo needs to really find leadership that can restore confidence in the company. I don’t think they are so much in danger of immediately going under as they are in facing continued erosion of confidence in the company’s leadership and direction.”

The company’s next CEO must convince the market that Yahoo has a sound plan and the decisive leadership to carry it out, he added.

“Yahoo suffers right now from a somewhat fragmented portfolio of service and innovations,” Frank added. “Rationalizing that portfolio with or without some kind of new partner or merger is going to be very important. Yahoo isn’t getting the synergy that it needs out of this combination of stuff that they have.”

David Card, an analyst at JupiterResearch, now part of Forrester Research Inc., added that the new CEO will need to do an inventory check of Yahoo’s assets. Yahoo is finding its traditional Web portal model under siege from Google while multiple upstart social networking players are cutting into its potential advertising revenue, he added. “Yahoo really has not pulled off an answer to those threats,” he noted.

However, Yahoo does have a large, loyal audience base that is increasingly offering up user-generated content that could be used to help its advertisers target the users, Card added. “They have a lot of information about their customer base,” he said. “In theory, you could open those things up to a more socialized approach and/or you can use that information for advertising targeting. It hasn’t been able to convince advertisers that the value is there … to take advantage of that targeting.”

Yang will step down as CEO once a replacement is found, and will go back to being “Chief Yahoo,” which was his previous job at Yahoo. He will focus on Yahoo’s global strategy and will attempt to try and help Yahoo in its most tumultuous time.

“Jerry and the board have had an ongoing dialogue about succession timing, and we all agree that now is the right time to make the transition to a new CEO who can take the company to the next level,” Yahoo board members said in a statement. “We are deeply grateful to Jerry for his many contributions as CEO over the past 18 months, and we are pleased that he plans to stay actively involved at Yahoo as a key executive and member of the board.”

Yang publicly stated he wished to remain in control of Yahoo, but the company’s board faced too much pressure to try and replace him because of failed business deals over the past few months.

Yahoo will work with executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles to help look for a new candidate — the board will consider Yahoo executives and outsiders.

After becoming CEO in June 2007 Yang saw success, but his tenure as CEO will likely be remembered as a failure due to a stifled bid by Microsoft to take over the search engine giant.

After months of publicly trading arguments, Microsoft eventually offered to purchase the company for a reduced price, which was again turned down. In early September, the company’s stock price plummeted to $17.81; a number that some analysts predicted would be the lowest it would reach before Yahoo could turn things around. Yahoo’s shares closed today at $10.63 — its lowest sharing price in five years.

The deployment starts with a handful of markets – New England, Philadelphia, and New Jersey – but should be available in the top 10 markets nationwide by the end of the year.

Wideband service will be available to subscribers under two different prices: $62.95 or $139.95 a month for residential customers, and $99.95 or $189.95 a month for businesses. The higher priced “Extreme 50” service offers speeds of up to 50 Mbps downstream/ 10 Mbps upstream, while “Ultra” service offers half the bandwidth for half the price.

Current DOCSIS 2.0 speeds top out at around 38 Mbps for downstream service, per channel. DOCSIS 3.0 allows ISPs to bond multiple channels into a single connection, allowing for up to an eight-fold increase in speed – up to 300 Mbps in the U.S. and 400 Mbps in Europe. Furthermore, the new specification adds full support for IPv6.

Yahoo co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang, under pressure by some investors of late to resign, gave a statement describing the cuts, stating, “We have been disciplined about balancing investments with cost management all year, and have now set in motion initiatives to reduce costs and enhance productivity. The steps we are taking this quarter should deliver both near-term benefits to operating cash flow, and substantially enhance the nimbleness and flexibility with which we compete over the long term.”

At least 10 percent of Yahoo’s workforce will be slashed, meaning that at least 1,520 will lose their jobs. The company hopes that the cuts will help it to reduce costs, while not significantly reducing its profitability.

The cuts were the second for Yahoo this year, with the company letting 1,000 employees go this last January. In total, Yahoo has let go close to 16 percent of its workforce since the start of the year.

Yahoo’s revenue for the quarter was $1.79B USD, up 1 percent from the quarter a year before. Without the commissions it paid ad partners, the company pulled in $1.33B USD, slightly lower than the average analyst prediction of $1.37B USD. Net income for Yahoo was $54M USD, down 51 percent from last year. Profits excluding one-time charges were $123M USD, roughly in line with analyst expectations.

Mozilla claims that Firefox 3 will be seven times faster than Internet Explorer and three or four times faster than previous versions of Firefox. Other new features include single-click bookmarking, smart location bar, and improved security features.

Firefox 3 also brings improvements in how passwords are managed, a new download manager, full page zoom and more. One other interesting thing about the pending release of Firefox 3 today is the attempt to set a world record.

Interest in raw computational speed waned — sorry, IBM — after data center managers began turning away from super-expensive supercomputers and toward massive grids comprised of cheap PC servers.

Meanwhile, the rise of business intelligence and its even more technical cousin, business analytics, has spurred interest in super-large data warehouses that boost profits by crunching the behavior patterns of millions of consumers at a time.

Take Yahoo Inc.’s 2-petabyte, specially built data warehouse, which it uses to analyze the behavior of its half-billion Web visitors per month. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company makes a strong claim that it is not only the world’s single-largest database, but also the busiest.

Based on a heavily modified PostgreSQL engine, the year-old database processes 24 billion events a day, according to Waqar Hasan, vice president of engineering in Yahoo’s data group.

And the data, all of it constantly accessed and all of it stored in a structured, ready-to-crunch form, is expected to grow into the multiple tens of petabytes by next year.

The nationwide rollout will continue throughout 2008, the companies said in a statement. The deal was first announced Feb. 11, when Starbucks said it was moving to AT&T Wi-Fi instead of T-Mobile USA as its in-store hot spot provider.

Although some reports have described the Starbucks rollout as offering free Wi-Fi, there are some limits. Starting May 1, AT&T broadband Internet and Wi-Fi customers who have paid a monthly fee to AT&T will have complimentary Wi-Fi access at more than 7,000 Starbucks locations nationwide. AT&T offers free Wi-Fi service to its three higher-speed residential broadband subscribers, all of its small business subscribers and all of its U-verse high-speed Internet subscribers.

Some sellers tried to boycott eBay. Initial metrics seemed to show the boycott to be working — listings were decreasing and sales were down, by most official counts, although eBay insisted they weren’t.

However eBay soon rebounded and resumed largely business as usual, despite having lost a few loyal sellers. As DailyTech’s Shane McGlaun wrote in a blog, sellers really had few choices — Amazon.com only allows resale of select items such as CDs or books, and Craigslist.com is avoided by many, due to its unseemly reputation as a hotbed for illegal activity. Most sellers were stuck with eBay, whether they loved it or hated it.

On Wednesday, eBay CEO John Donahoe announced a stronger than expected earnings report, with the company reporting $2.19B USD in revenue, a 24 percent increase over Q1 2007. The performance significantly beat analyst expectations. Net income also rose 22 percent to $562M USD.

The informal group headed by Bostock also includes other board members and billionaire investor Ron Burkle, according to the report in the New York Post, which quoted unnamed sources close to the situation. Board members Eric Hippeau, a managing partner at Softbank Capital, and Robert Kotick, CEO of Activision Publishing Inc., are standing behind Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, who does not want to accept Microsoft’s offer.

On Monday, Yahoo’s board rejected Microsoft’s offer, saying it undervalued the company. According to the Post, the discord revolves around Yang and his followers being so opposed to selling the company to Microsoft that Bostock and his group fear they will act out of emotions rather than their fiduciary duty to Yahoo shareholders. Such an action could expose the board to lawsuits by shareholders.

Yang sent a letter to shareholders Wednesday night, saying that Microsoft’s bid substantially undervalues the company and that Yahoo is positioned to take advantage of growth in the online advertising market.

Microsoft is trying to force itself on Yahoo by bringing its bid directly to stockholders in an unsolicited buyout offer, in a hostile takeover attempt. To beat off Microsoft’s ardent advances, Yahoo’s board hoped to establish a possible advertising alliance with rival Google. However, inside sources now say that despite some minor initial interest, Google is unlikely to pursue a pact with Yahoo.

While Google refused to public comment on the issue, sources say that it is concerned that a possible pact would attract antitrust scrutiny in the U.S. and abroad, and thus its not interested anymore. Another unsaid factor may be that Google does not want to associate itself with sinking Yahoo, which is laying off hundreds of workers, while promising desparately to enact “big changes.” In a way Google doesn’t need an alliance with Yahoo to get its share of advertising — its already getting it, piece by piece each month.