Everyone from Wall Street analysts to former employees to advertising firms seems to know just what struggling World Wide Web pioneer Yahoo should do to turn itself around. And each “solution” is a doozy: Lay off hundreds or even thousands of employees. Get out of the search ad business and just use Google. Sell out completely to Microsoft.

As persistent as all these rumors have been by the past year or more, the most radical versions of those moves are still unlikely to happen until Yahoo addresses its overriding problem: Its leaders — in specific co-founder and Chief Executive Jerry Yang — need to decide once and for all what Yahoo stands for in a new era dominated by search and social networking. And they must clearly articulate how they’re going to get it there.

Start at the Top. So far, that hasn’t happened. Last October, Yang outlined a strategic direction that to many observers was more of

a three-pronged to-do list than a cohesive vision of Yahoo’s future. He said Yahoo would look to be the starting point for World Wide Web users, extend its ad offerings to other sites, and open up its technology base to outside programmers and publishers to come up with spiffy new services for the company’s Web pages.

But many citizens, most of all investors, don’t think any of that will help consumers understand why they should spend more moment using Yahoo than Google, Facebook, MySpace, or countless other services growing much faster in popularity. Even folks at Yahoo, says one executive, aren’t certain which projects they should focus on, so efforts to improve services continue to move slowly. “I don’t think they understand where to go,” says Sramana Mitra, a Silicon Valley Web strategist who has written extensively about Yahoo’s challenges on her blog. “They’re running around like chickens.”

With inadequate…

Orginal post by Top Tech News