The latest Valley guessing game: Who will be Yahoo's next CEO? Jerry Yang's days seem numbered; if he does not win reelection to the board at Yahoo's annual shareholder meeting, now pushed back to August, he will almost certainly have to step down as boss, too. Overeager to throw a name out — likely in the hopes of currying favor if one of their guesses turns out to be right — the likes of Kara Swisher and Michael Arrington are suggesting a series of candidates. Dan Lyons gets it right in a blog post, writing as Fake Jerry Yang: None of them are likely to fly. None are likely even to be interested in the job.

Like a child actor, Yahoo has always lived its life in public — and suffered for it. Its April 1996 IPO, when the company had a mere 49 employees, cast it in the spotlight long before it was ready. And like Hollywood, the stock market looks coldly on a fallen star. Microsoft's offer of $44 billion is less than the company was worth in October 1999 — before the tech-stock bubble's grotesque inflation more than doubled that to $97 billion. It has never regained its swagger.