Carol Bartz

A throwaway line in a CEO Scott Thompson's bio may cost him his job running Yahoo!, and it has already apparently ended the gig for Patti Hart -- the Yahoo! board member who hired him.

Yahoo's embattled co-founder Jerry Yang is off the board, but for disgruntled investor Third Point LLC, that's not good enough. The hedge fund with a 5.2% stake in Yahoo wants to take down Chairman Roy Bostock and potentially three other directors.

On Wednesday, Yahoo named Scott Thompson as CEO. He's a former PayPal president and veteran technologist -- and that's the trouble: Yahoo is following the same strategy that led it to hire Carol Bartz, who was ousted for failing to turn the company around.

Everyone seems anxious to hook up Yahoo! these days. The dot-com pioneer has become that single aunt in every family whom everyone thinks sorely needs a soul mate. But what if Yahoo! is happy to be single? After all, it just spent $270 million on a acquisition of its own to beef up its online advertising.

Companies do the darndest things, and last week was no exception. Consider these recent surprises, blunders, and flat-out boneheaded moves, including: Talbots making like Yahoo and firing its CEO; Walmart returning to layaway financing; and digital recorder overkill from TiVo. (NO one watches that much telly.)

On Tuesday, Yahoo ousted embattled CEO Carol Bartz, potentially paving the way for media-savvy executive Ross Levinsohn to step in and lead the struggling Internet company. To date, some members of Yahoo's board are "very much impressed" with Levinsohn, according to one source.

Carol Bartz was CEO of Yahoo! until yesterday, when she was unceremoniously fired. During her three year-tenure, Bartz pushed the stock price up 6.6%. Now the online giant's shares have moved roughly the same amount on news of her departure. But the market didn't send shares of Yahoo! higher because Bartz is gone, but rather because of what may come next.

Internet company Yahoo announced late Tuesday that it had fired Carol Bartz as CEO. After more than two years of financial lethargy, investors became convinced that she couldn't steer Yahoo to a long-promised turnaround.

Yahoo's analyst day Wednesday addressed the steps the struggling Internet pioneer is taking to reposition the ship and revive its sagging stock, but on the subject of a controversial transaction involving one of its major Asian investments, its executives left a number of questions unanswered.

Ever since rebuffing Microsoft's takeover bid, Yahoo has been keen to placate angry shareholders, and Carol Bartz's latest moves are doing that still. But by failing to keep up with true social networking a la Facebook, Yahoo risks losing its loyal audience.