History has favored struggling technology companies who bring bring back a motivating founder as chief executive to get back on the right track. Apple brought back Steve Jobs and now Yahoo! brought back Jerry Yang to replace Terry Semel. But the shake up shouldn't come as much of a surprise since the shareholder meeting, plus Semel was has been on replacement-watch for the better part of a year, having most recently listed on Jon Ogg's 24/7 Wall St. list of ten CEO's who ought to go. Yet, there had been no talk of who would take over for Semel, let alone co-founder Jerry Yang, so the announcement of Yang as CEO was sudden.

Yang, who never really was the management and operations type, has always been characterized as the passionate visionary that could bring the spirit of Yahoo! back to employees and investors alike. Plus, he has the former CFO now as President, Susan Decker,a strategic thinker and financial wizard, keeping the visionary on track.

The entrepreneurial zest at Yahoo! waned as Semel tried to build a more structured, acquisition-powered media company, while cross-town rival Google was letting its employees lolly-gag 20% of their workweek on new, personal projects that served to produce an innovation engine from within. In doing so, Google was leveraging its free spirited, creative atmosphere, while recruiting the most talented engineers and investing its shareholder capital by bringing on external assets like YouTube to complement the rest of the company's strategy portfolio. Semel's idea of running Yahoo! like a new media conglomerate left little room for innovation as employees concentrated on the bottom line. Yang's self-deprecating personality should encourage a different environment for employees. (read more)

Worldviews matter a lot - maybe more than anything else - when it comes to competitive strategy. This was highlighted last week as Viacom launched a copyright infringement lawsuit against YouTube and Google claiming $1 billion in damages from the 150,000 clips of their content (in particular, the vast library of MTV programming) that has been collectively viewed more than 1.5 billion times.

Viacom claims that, although YouTube does remove such material if asked, the Google-owned company deliberately puts the burden on the copyright holder, and makes it unreasonably difficult for copyrighted works to be removed. This has led to the fantastic gains in traffic, trending momentum that amounted to a valuation in Google's acquisition of YouTube of $1.65 billion when the companies merged a few months ago despite YouTube's "immaterial" contribution to Google's revenue mix.(read more)