While I am not a Yahoo! watcher by any means, the change in the guard at Yahoo! is clearly something that’s reverberating throughout the technosphere, so heck — I’ll give my unqualified $0.02 as well. You know, Terry Semel may or may not have been bad for Yahoo. Sue Decker may or may not have been a bit of a failure as it applies to Panama’s launch.

But what I do know is that Jerry Yang, the new CEO of Yahoo!, is clearly the Master of Vacuously Bland Corporate Marketingspeak.

Take this paragraph, for example, on his new vision:

What is that vision? A Yahoo! that executes with speed, clarity and discipline. A Yahoo! that increases its focus on differentiating its products and investing in creativity and innovation. A Yahoo! that better monetizes its audience. A Yahoo! whose great talent is galvanized to address its challenges. And a Yahoo! that is better focused on what’s important to its users, customers, and employees.

This has got to be the most vague, useless, and idiotic vision sentiment that I have ever had read. Its full of unspecific and uninspiring platitudes, the exact *opposite* of the what Yahoo! needs in its fight to get out of being a perennial second place finisher to Google.

I mean, its nice to think that Mr. Yang wants Yahoo to be fast, clear, disciplined, differentiated, focused and galvanized. But so what? Aren’t most companies wanting to be fast, clear, disciplined, differentiated, focused, and galvanized?

And if they weren’t *already* that way, what were they before?

Slow, vague, lazy, unfocused, and lethargic?

Come on.

Some people have said that Mr. Yang is no Steve Jobs. That’s not a fair comparison, because I think there is no one who comes even *close* to what Steve Jobs has done for Apple.

Rather, I think what everyone is actually craving for is someone who has the singular vision and will to pull Yahoo! into something that is bigger than the sum of its parts — to create something that is worthy of the its legacy as one of the first real pioneers of the Internet.

Of course, being fast, focused, galvanized and — well, all that other stuff — is important, that’s all tactical. Vision statements (or sentiments) are bigger than that. To put it into the parlance of Getting Things Done — its 50,000 feet level stuff. Its stuff that’s meant to put fire in your belly, inspire everyone to bigger and better things, and define your very reason for being.

Heck, one quick and dirty way of creating Yahoo!’s vision statment — just be the opposite of Google.

How about a web entity that is utterly devoted to being enabling the best of every human interaction on the Internet? This could encompass every aspect of its media aspirations, but could also provide a way to chart its way to social networks and web2.0 applications, from everything to Flickr to MyBlogLog, to, one day, perhaps, Facebook.

Keeping a focus on making sure that every day operations are done properly important — but at this point, Yahoo! is in dire need of someone with the guts to have a singular vision to pull all of its desperate components together into something that is bigger than any one of them apart. Someone who is at the same time both inspiring, but ruthless enough to have the cajones to make changes that are necessary.

Is Jerry Yang that kind of guy?

While I’d like to think that he is, its precisely his kind of blog post which make me think otherwise. But hey — the proof of the pudding is in the tasting, and I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

For now.

[While I consider shorting Yahoo ... ;) ]