To help understand why Yahoo has been in such trouble, read Kara Swisher’s latest about the board’s search for a new CEO and especially the last line, which sums things up perfectly:

Said one person close to the situation: “A lot of what has been going on is the board trying to figure out what kind of company does Yahoo aspire to be. That determines the type of person they bring in.”

Seems to me that Yahoo should have known the answer to this a long, long time ago.

At the Journal’s D: All Things Digital conference last year, then-CEO Jerry Yang and Sue Decker, the company’s president were asked for a simple explanation of what Yahoo does. They rambled dismayingly for several minutes.

I had my own answer: “Yahoo is a collection of consumer-Internet services, and first or second in a whole bunch of them, and we make a lot of money.” I still think it’s a decent answer.