Yahoo Making Lemonade Out of Sewage  ⚐

I'll keep this short, since my punditry is not strong.

Jesus. Yahoo! just made lemonade out of a massive pile of horseshit.

— Ryan Toohil (@ryant) July 16, 2012

Yahoo hiring Marissa Mayer as CEO was probably one of the only moves Yahoo could make to keep the company relevant in the short term. This is a major shot in the arm for Yahoo, putting a real technology person in the head spot, someone who (at least from the east coast) has some major star power and real dork creds.

She's smart, she lead Google Search during its heyday, and she's a pick that makes perfect sense. Which makes the fact that the pick is shocking enough to keep Yahoo in the news for a few more days (and enough to make everyone wonder why she wasn't on the shortlist of speculated options all along).

But, more than that, Mayer should at least keep some smart people from abandoning the Yahoo ship, giving her time to plot a new course. It'll be interesting to see where Yahoo goes, as the places they are really strong (Sports/Fantasy Sports, News/Finance, arguably Flickr, I suppose Yahoo Mail is still big) are places that are strong, but not really growing. Do they double-down and try to take ownership of those areas? Or do they carve a new path?

Two days ago, Yahoo had a short list of uninspiring candidates, with all of the interesting ones saying publically they had no desire to lead Yahoo.

Today, Yahoo has a new CEO with legit technology credentials; it makes a huge leap forward by having a young, female CEO; and Yahoo now has more of the world's attention (and probably not just the tech world) than they've had since the shareholder revolt, which is not what you want attention for.

See, interesting. Really interesting. Way more interesting than if Yahoo had just hired another media person. Now I'll pay attention to Yahoo for more than checking my 15 year old email address and managing my fantasy football teams.