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With the recent death of Stock Exchange pioneer Muriel Siebert, who was the first woman to buy a seat on the NYSE,  it seems a perfect moment to talk about Yahoo. (YHOO)

There was a time circa 2000, when Yahoo was flying high along with other Internet start ups with their glittering IPOs and go go spending. But when the boom went bust in 2001, many of those start ups and IPOs went belly up. Anyone remember Inktomi? How about Pets.com? I know…bad memories.

But Yahoo continued to drift along. We still needed Yahoo because it provide email, a search engine,  a cool, customizable home page (still my home page) and lots of other features like flickr for photo uploading. But in the post Dot Com days,  Yahoo lost their edge, their panache and their leadership edge and drifted along for years under various CEOs.

And then along came Mary. Or actually Marissa. As in Marissa Mayer, the product guru of Google. She came on board and has been steadily remodeling the company with a new focus on strategic acquisitions, marketing, search and new products. In July, Yahoo beat Google in web traffic!  And guess what, the stock has been rising steadily.  It may not be meteoric but Yahoo feels new and fresh and current just like its new logo and font.

I’m long on Yahoo. I think a lot of surprises are ahead. Good ones.  In fact, I’m curious about a possible Apple/Yahoo deal.  I have no evidence more solid than the fact that both have recently chosen lighter, more modern fonts for their sites and products. Could more design “coincidences” be in the works?

I’m glad there’s a woman at the helm at Yahoo. She’s not afraid to shake things up. Just like Muriel Siebert, a pioneer of her era.

Related articles

• Yahoo Edges Google with More Visitors in July (hispanicbusiness.com)
• Yahoo passed Google in US Web visitors in July (kansascity.com)
• Please Tell Me We Won’t Hear The Yahoo Yell Again. (futurelawyer.typepad.com)
• Design Love: Yahoo! Weather (phandroid.com)
• No Henry, you need to get real about Yahoo. Here are the facts [GigaOM] (gigaom.com)
• Yahoo tips Google off Web traffic throne: How Marissa Mayer did it (csmonitor.com)
• Muriel Siebert – an excerpt from her oral biography (lynngilbert.wordpress.com)
• Muriel Siebert, Who Broke Wall Street Gender Barrier, Dies at 80 (bloomberg.com)